Edward Said and Jacques Derrida: Reconstellating Humanism and the Global Hybrid

Edward Said and Jacques Derrida: Reconstellating Humanism and the Global Hybrid

Edward Said and Jacques Derrida: Reconstellating Humanism and the Global Hybrid

Edited by

Mina Karavanta and Nina Morgan

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

MAIN

209 5/3Jt'-edVJ

Edward Said and Jacques Dcrrida: Rcconstcllating Humanism and the Global Hybrid, Edited by Mina Karavanla and Nina Morgan This book first published 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NES 2JA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

CopYright C> 2008 by Mina Karavanta and Nina Morgan and contributOr> All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying. recording or otherwise, withoutlhe prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-84718-616-5, ISBN (13): 9781847186164

To our loving husbands, Peter Morgan and Dimitris Angelopoulos, and children, Nicholas Morgan, Amarantha and Marilia Angelopoulos, who bore witness to our absence and presence and traveled with us, and who have taught us and continue to teach us to think. in a loving and caring way.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Introduction "Humanism, Hybridity and Democratic Praxis" Mina Karavanta and Nina Morgan

ix I

PART I: DECONSTRUCTING HUMANISM IN THE NAME OF THE HUMAN AS NOT ONE Chapter One "Edward Said's Humanism and American Exceptionalism: , An Interrogation after 9/11" William V. Spanos

24

Chapter Two 55 "'Like a Sibylline Creature': The Woman Migrant as Humanist Subject in Jacob Lawrence's Early Work" Julla Gsoels-Lorensen Chapter Three , "Edward Said's Literary Humanism" R. Radhakrishnan

88

Chapter Four 116 "'In the Precarious Exilic Realm': Edward Said's Andalusian Journeys" Tabea Linhard PART II: AFFIRMING HUMANISM: SECULAR CRITICISM AND DEMOCRATIC PRAXIS Chapter Five " "Said and Secularism" Bruce Robbins

140

VIII

"

Table Of Contents

Chapter Six "Humanism Between Hubris and Heroism" Vassilis Lambropoulos

158

Chapter Seven "Rethinking Humanism" Stathis Gourgouris

174

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Chapter Eight... " "The Utopian Humanist" Efterpi Mitsi

~

199

PART III: THE GLOBAL HYBRID AND THE CALL FOR CRITIQUE: RETHINKING THE HUMAN AND HER/HIS ABODE Chapter Nine "Ethical Antihumanism" Samir Dayal

,

Chapter Ten "Towards a Post-Western Humanism Made to the Measure of Those Recently Recognized as Human" Joan Anim-Addo Chapter Eleven "La Dividua-A Gendered Figuration for A Planetary Humanism" Giovanna Covi

I(

I<,

220

250

274

Chapter Twelve 304 "Said, Derrida and the Undecidable Human: In the Name of Inhabitancy" Robert P. Marzec Chapter Thirteen "'Another Insistence': Humanism and the Aporia of Community" Mina Karavanta & Nina Morgan

324

Contributors

354

Index

358

We hope that the readers of this volume will recognize the passionate commitment of its writers-an international group of individuals whose wide-ranging experiences and learned accomplishments inform their unique and formidable thoughts. As the editors, we would first like to thank them for their intellectual generosity and the many personal kindnesses they showed us. This collection developed out of an invitation by Cambridge Scholars Press; we owe its editors a debt of gratitude for their interest in our work. The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Research at Kennesaw State University offered fmancial support for the research of this project, as did the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Kennesaw State University, the Department of English, and the KSU Foundation. Additionally, the School of Philosophy, Faculty of English Studies, and the Special Research Fund of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (EtOIKO<; i\oyaplaof,lo<; 'Ep&Uva<; EKllA) supported our lectures and research meetings. We are thankful for their attention and support. Giovanna Covi and the graduate students of her doctoral course Intercultural Studies (Studi Interculturalli) at the University of Trento in Italy who read parts of this project and who gave us their thoughts were an inspiration and reminder of the energy and excitement that is much alive in the halls of Humanities programs around the world. Peter Morgan's photograph "Street Scene, Oaxaca" and Nicholas Morgan's design together created the cover art for this book; we much appreciate their collaborative contribution to this project. We would also like to thank our many family members, friends and readers whose care and support we value very much. We are grateful to William V. Spanos and Kathleen Kornell of the University of Illinois Press for allowing us to print a version of Spanos' first chapter "Edward Said and the Poststructuralists: Introduction" from The Legacy of Edward W. Said (University of Illinois Press, 2008); we also warmly thank R. Radhakrishnan and Cultural Critique for allowing us to reprint his essay "Edward Said's Literary Humanism" (Cultural Critique 67, Fall 2007: 1342).

INTRODUCTION: HUMANISM, HYBRlDITY AND DEMOCRATIC PRAXIS MINA KARAVANTA & NINA MORGAN

Every philosophical colloquium...has a political significance. -Derrida, 1968 [Clultural forms are hybrid, mixed, impure, and the time has come in cultural analysis to reconnect their analysis with their actuality. -Said,1993

Why humanism now? Why invoke a term, which, since its conception, has always been in crisis, complicit, as it has been, with the project of modernity, the expansion of colonialism, the growth of imperialism and now the domination of global capital? We invoke humanism neither to resuscitate its metaphysical tradition in absence of a redeeming ideology nor to redefine it as the response to the technocratic age of global capital; instead, we propose to delve into its ruins in order to rethink the question of the human despite the reductive and destructive consequences of humanism. By sustaining the question of what it is to be human within the matrix of global powers, this collection of essays attempts the creation of a previously un-thought and untried affiliation between Edward Said and Jacques Derrida, two thinkers who dominated the scene of literary criticism, theory and philosophy of the 20 th century and who passionately engaged, in their respective works and in their variegated ways, the question of the human and herlhis abode. Our collection does not offer a systematic comparative analysis of their works, a task that we think is crucial and yet to be taken up. It is only the opening of an address to the question of the human and the politics of humanism in the global age from the multiple perspectives that this temporary affiliation between Said and Derrida has afforded the contributors to this collection. Under the auspices of globalization, wherein the transformation of democratic nation-states, multinational corporations, and transnational

-

2

Karavanta & Morgan

currencies operates simultaneous to the proliferation of paperless peoples, technologies of communication, and fundamentalisms, the possibility of a shared sense of the human is without doubt under extreme pressure. Humanism's history alongside the event of today's globalization has· produced the concept of the human subject as the witness to and the body of a history of oppression, a condition of "unevenness,,,1 and a messianic project of a yet-to-come of being. Such contingency informs what we call the "condition of concurrency" that names the overlapping histories, alliances, conflicts; defines the network of affinities and disjunctures; and indicates, for us, the necessary dynamic of the processes of hybridization. Our understanding of global hybridity challenges the idea of hybridity as a shared, assimilating process of change and transformation, as acts that are willed or chosen or autonomously performed evenly throughout the world. To critically interrogate humanism in view of the "global hybrid" as a condition and metanarrative, we invoke Said and Derrida's intellectually rigorous examination of humanism in their works; yet by wrenching Said and Derrida out of their contexts-by dis-engaging them from their respective habitats of systematic interpretation and use, which have schematically equated them to the areas of postcolonial studies and deconstruction respectively-and by thrusting them into each other's company, we propose to create a persistent albeit temporary reconstellation of those traces of their works in which they sustain the practice of critique and open the question of the political. Rather than a structuralist readin of their works and a drawing of the possible parallels, the reconstellation that we propose attends to the fissures, margins, and breaks that their respective commitment to critique has created. Instead of reading their works as therapeutic tools through which to understand the one through the other, the essays of this collection pursue the traces of their works in theoretical, philosophical, historical and literary contexts in which the presence and/or cohabitation of Said and Derrida's signatures have not been openly (or at all) engaged. Despite their different and often opposing practices of critique, Derrida and Said are characterized by some shared intellectual and scholarly graces: they are both attentive to the text, always already pursuing close readings that symptomatically reveal multiple contingencies; they are both enamored by the power of the literary text to imagine the impossible, to create the site where the yet-to-come is always already here in presenting the communities of co-existence or convivencia3 as events whose history and politics have yet to be recorded and fashioned appropriately and in consistency with the multiple and confluent needs of the people who inhabit them. Still, both Said and Derrida oppose a facile celebration of the

r

Introduction: Humanism, Hybridity and Democratic Praxis

3

beginning of a new era in which hybrid identities will overcome national and restrictive agendas. Both thinkers engage critique not to praise any specific concept of tradition but instead to enact their philological and literary analysis in the name of the political; thus in attending to the multiple positions of the text, in analyzing the ways they constitute and are constituted by historical, political and social reality, both Said and Derrida affirm the need for a kind of critical praxis that contends with the political. In their different modes and tones, they keep the question open to engage the political and philosophical condition of exile and dis-belonging, and the political and philosophical imperatives of hospitality and friendship. One more point of common departure that facilitates their invigorating critical praxes is their disobedience to the principles and axioms of an epistemology and/or a methodology. In other words, their works remain asystemic even when identified as part of a method or system. We believe that both Said's secular criticism---or what Aamir Mufti has called "critical secularism" in inverting Said's terms to better interpret and empower them4-and Derrida's deconstructive praxis lack the programmatic and syntactic nature of a theoretical methodology that can be applied consistently and towards an a priori visible goal. Said's work, especially Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, may very well be identified, studied and taught as the texts that inaugurate the field of postcolonial studies, but Said's style and commitment to a wide array of "canonical" and "western" texts and love for other genres (music and opera, for example) resist such an easy categorization. And Derrida, despite his many followers and detractors, resists the distillation of deconstruction to a grammatological practice that remains bound to the text and hence caters to its insularity; instead, he opens it to the question of the political to contemplate the issues of justice and friendship and the praxis of cosmopolitanism in the age of globalization. By disobeying a more systemic and orderly critical praxis, Said and Derrida may have, in other eyes, erred, but in the process they have offered attentive and caring readings of the silence and voices of those who are still more oppressed, more excluded, more marginalized in and against the global and its rhetoric of flow and liberation. Finally, another point of affiliation between Said and Derrida is their profound awareness of the hybrid nature of their experience, both going so far as to use the word "hybrid" by way of describing themselves; Said declared, "I am... a sort of hybrid" (qtd. in Rushdie 182) and Derrida noted that he considered himself to be "a sort of over-acculturated, overcolonized European hybrid" (Derrida 7).5 Except for their obvious

4

Karavanta & Morgan

hybrid origins however, (Derrida of Algerian-French and Jewish origins, and Said, an Arab-Christian of Palestinian origin) Said and Derrida's attachment to hybridity was of a more performative nature. Moving between histories, cultures, languages and geographies, their works resist allegiance to a genre or capture by a historical period or a particular author; and just as they are attuned to voices always already other or especially when addressing canonical materials (texts too often,tamed by limited and blindfolded analyses), their questions reconstellate issues of interpretation, meaning, and truth. The paradoxes of Said and Derrida's multiple attachments to and engagements with both the 'world of unconstituted constituencies and the world of the metropolitan West have often exposed them to criticism yet few would dispute the fact that Said and Derrida paved ways for the intellectual world to think about the exilic condition in a postcolonial and global age. The complexity of their politically, historically and aesthetically engaging readings of the world as both a "shared experience" in which "there is no way of having an experience by yourself' (Said)6 and as a site where "there is no world, only islands" (Derrida qtd. in Miller 48)7 only accentuates the urgency at the heart of our opening of the question of humanism. We are in league with Said and Derrida when we say that we are in search of a different kind of critique--one that has a future, but no specific formula or eo procedure. As W.J.T. Mitchell notes, both Said and Derrida advocated "the possibility of a radical mutation of human thought" (59). In this way, Derrida's undecidability in fact affords the possibility for an ethical criticism, one that isn't performed or designated by politics, power, or the latest trends (even retro ones) in literary studies; likewise, Said's call for a secular humanism as the means for an emancipatory humanism that is a working humanism, a daily humanism, a changing humanism opens the lj)oliticalthrough the practices of the literary. In light of these nodes that sustain this temporary affiliation between Said and Derrida, we propose to ask the question of humanism yet again. In our pursuit of this question of humanism and the human and her/his abode, we follow Said's definition of humanism in Humanism and Democratic Criticism as "the practice of participatory citizenship" whose "purpose is to make more things available to critical scrutiny" and thus disclose its "human misreading and misinterpretations of a collective past and present" (22). This disclosure cannot be fully realizable without the insistent critique of the term humanism and its investments that Derrida's work never ceases to pursue. As impossible as a coherent yoking of these two strategies of critical affirmation and deconstructive praxis appears to be, especially in the academic terrain where the works of these two

Introduction: Humanism, Hybridity and Democratic Praxis

5

thinkers have yet to be closely and seriously studied together in the name of what theory is to be or do now, in the age of the end narratives, in the age of globality, we propose that responsible critique cannot be done otherwise-for to do so otherwise would be merely to reproduce the blind spots of both strategies and their tethered discourses. We reconstellate the terms "humanism" and the "global hybrid" under the "condition of concurrency" to set alight a conflagration of oppositions in order to release potential critical insights and actions that together share the question of the Human anew-and from this newness challenge the problem of its representations and the politics of its manifestations. This volume performs reconstellation as an act that places in critical affiliation and in productive opposition the strategies of deconstruction and secular criticism-both intrinsically pertinent to the act of reconstellation as we intend to perform it-as they are articulated within but also apart from the critical terrain of Derrida and Said's works. Our methodology of reconstellation operates in a complex way as it formulates a network of affiliations both between Said and Derrida as well as between readings of their concepts through other thinkers who have also challenged and pursued the question of the human and the role of critique in the age of the global. We therefore define reconstellation as a strategy of risk that cannot predetermine the outcome of the encounter and calculate the procured connections and affiliations; instead, it ventures to create an unimagined community, to welcome a "messianicity without messianism," and to rely on the incalculability of l'avenir. In the temporality of the reconstellated site, this community formed by a critical alliance of voices, strategies and narratives emerges as an epistemological and historical break. Taken out of their sequence and contexts, these voices, strategies and narratives vertically disrupt the continuum of the grand narrative of history to reconfigure the history of the present by telling the stories and writing the histories of those constituencies often left out or kept in the margins. Our volume attempts a gathering of such a community, formed by intellectuals who represent a world of discrepant experiences, languages, histories, and cultures that challenge the common language and shared critical practices which keep them connected in the western academic world, here temporarily and critically allied in this volume. The temporal but also vertical nature of this critical praxis is contingent upon the contemporary condition of globalization, a complex unevenness which requires a meticulous analysis of the present and a detailed study of the everyday in all the differences such temporalities disseminate, to invoke here Martin Heidegger's attentiveness to the question of Being.s All efforts to explain the complex phenomenon of globalization-whether

6

Karavanta & Morgan

as defense or critique, whether defining globalization as a site of new articulations and liberatory movements 9 or as a site of poverty and exploitation regulated by the deregulating practices of transnational capitalism-these efforts share a fundamental question: the question of the human subject. This question has been elided by the very network of narratives that originated from the event and discourses of the Enlightenment from which point the importance, impact and ,!?eaning of what it is to be human has been monitored and promulgated by the institutions of the humanities through the discourses of nationalism, imperialism, and colonialism that are the forerunners of today's globalization. As different linguistic, cultural, and political realities leak into each other and the rapid flows of capital and labor force produce new social, economic, and political conditions of co-existence, the reinvention of the public sphere and the active participation in what Etienne Balibar calls the "constitution of citizenship" (156) as a process in-the-making have become the imperatives of our age. Yet rethinking humanism alongside these accelerated strategies of being in the world is a challenge made more complex by a wide array of political, technological and aesthetic forms of representation and new arguments about what "hybridity" might mean in the emerging public realm of the global sphere. Nestor Garcia Canclini, in his Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and LeaVing Modernity (2005), offers an extended discussion on-and defense of-the term "hybridity," arguing that the "processes of hybridization" should be the focus of an advanced and more theoretically informed analysis of the conditions of hybridity. Warning us against falling into an identitarian politics that seeks only to describe the hybrid in all of its countless manifestations, Canelini posits that while "studies about hybridization are usually limited to describing cross-cultural mixing," the goal of his study should be understood as "giving the concept hermeneutical capacity: making it useful for interpreting relations of meaning that are reconstructed through mixing" (xxix). To sustain this trajectory away from merely describing toward hermeneutic theorizing, Canclini effectively hierarchizes hybridization above the panoply of its antecedents-"mestizqje, syncretism, and creolization"-by suggesting a historical view: hybridization is "specifically modern ...generated by the forms of integration conducted by nation-states, political populisms and the culture industries" whereas the other terms refer to the premodem surviving into the early modern period, hence Canclini's subtitle which directs us to conceive of hybridization as a specifically modern condition where the postmodern seems to have been elided by the onslaught of

Introduction: Humanism, Hybridity and Democratic Praxis

7

contemporary globalization and the resurgence of (to use Ulrick Beck's term), a "second modernity." Thus positioning "hybridization" both historically and hierarchically, Canelini (with a bow to Pierre Bourdieu) suggests that what happens inside the processes of hybridization is "reconversion," a strategy through which any sector of society might "take possession of the benefits of modernity" (xxvii). Canelini's articulation of hybridization as a process of conversion immediately suggests its liberating and emancipatory potential and invokes a world where all constituencies are global actors who opt to exit and enter-to their advantage--those hybridization processes that global capitalism has disseminated in modernity. This reading, optimistically assigning agency to previously isolated localities that due to conversion find creative outlets for their previously contained potential, seems to be oblivious to what R. Radhakrishnan has very aptly called the unevenness of globality, an unevenness that "remains structured in dominance" (93) while a certain rhetoric of globalization "has been able to conceal the fact that globalization is intended as a utopian resolution of the problems of the world: utopia sans politics, sans ethics, and sans ideological content" (99). Not only does the celebratory language of globalization hide its own origins, but Canelini's way of configuring the practices of hybridity also seems to elide the origins of those dispossessed others who "need" to hybridize in order to convert what society doesn't require into what it demands. Bearing in mind that the development is uneven and that globality is often invoked in the name and language of domination and power, the name and language of transnational capitalism,1O we invoke the term "global hybrid" not to refer to a process accommodating fusion but to place alongside the homogenizing discourse of the global, the diversifying dynamic of the hybrid where the multiple crossings, affiliations, and alliances but also conflicts, oppositions, and encounters of violence work like a Derridean deconstruction to avail new realities and different narratives. Derrida therefore suggests the necessity in fact of making cohabit in a same text or of grafting codes, motifs, registers, voices that are heterogeneous... not.. .simply in order to do it or in order to force incompatible things into cohabitation or in order to create confusions-but to do it while trying to articulate these different registers to compose in some way the text so that the articulation of the heterogeneous voices among themselves both causes one to think and causes the language to think (Derrida, "Passages" 375). In opposition to an understanding of hybridi~ that operates as what Pheng Cheah has called "a e10set idealism" (302), 1 the global hybrid calls for a

--

8

Karavanta & Morgan

critical praxis that is attentive to the details of the everyday processes of hybridization and the regulating policies of homogenization as they are realized in the "scattered hegemonies" of transnational capital. Being il name that suggests the "destabilization of all ontopologies" that may create the "possibility of another history" (Moreiras qtd. in Canclini xxxii), we define the global hybrid as the name of the "condition of concurrency" that marks the incalculable simultaneity of unevenness and -difference; such concurrency affords both a challenge to gestures of erasure or as William V. Spanos calls them, the "amnesiac initiatives" of pQlitical and discursive power,12 while it also imparts the promise of "infinite variety and mystery" out of which no one can predict what may come-Derrida's l'avenir. 13 The first part of our collection entitled "Deconstructing Humanism in the Name of the Human as Not One" opens with William V. Spanos' critique of Said's defiant gesture toward theory in Humanism and Democratic Criticism. Spanos' essay performs an engaging deconstructive analysis of Edward Said's works, arguing that at the heart of the muchheralded Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Said, "having decided not to proffer a history of the meaning of the word" humanism, and "nowhere in his book... [addressing) ... earlier figures in such a way as to clearly indicate that they collectively constitute a humanist tradition," does not actually fully meet the high standards of careful reading and critique for which his own secular criticism calls. Spanos finds Said's recuperative project in Humanism and Democratic Criticism problematic in its indiscriminate dismissal of a generation of poststructuralist theorists that has systematically and, in Spanos' mind, persuasively shown Western humanism to be informed by the will to power over alterity and thus to be complicitous with classicism, sexism, racism, and imperialism. Spanos wonders whether Said's long-standing criticism of poststructuralist theory as threatening human agency, albeit at times justifiable, and his persistent distinction between his humanist critique of Western imperialism and the ontological and/or linguistic critique of Western thinking of the poststructuralist theorists that he condemns does not lead to the reduction of a potentially powerful collaborative critical momentum and to a disabling binary opposition between these approaches. Highlighting the gaps in that post 9/1 I work, Spanos then returns to Culture and Imperialism to reconstellate Said's analyses contrapuntally to the history and practice of American exceptionalism, the Bush administration's policies, and contemporary sites of socio-politics suggesting that Culture and Imperialism rather than Humanism and Democratic Criticism has . much to tell us about "the human, humanism, and the humanities."

I

Introduction: Humanism, Hybridity and Democratic Praxis

9

10 her essay '''Like a Sibylline Creature': The Woman Migrant as a Humanist Subject in Jacob Lawrence's Early Work," Jutta GsoelsLorensen pursues a reading of Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series (1941), a visual narrative representing the Great Migration of African Americans from the agrarian South to the industrialized cities in the North and West of the U.S. What Gsoels-Lorensen finds striking is Lawrence's representation of the "humanist subject" and his specific focus on the woman migrant's experience of the Great Migration; Said's engagement in 20th century migratory movements and his technique of counter-reading afford an entry into Gsoels-Lorensen's reading of Lawrence's specificity as a "painter of historical experience" rather than as he has been treated, that is, depoliticized, as a "historical painter." For Gsoels-Lorensen, the work of Lawrence "will not bow to a definition of 'man' that remains devoid of the question of justice." Gsoels-Lorensen thus employs Said's definition of humanism as a democratic praxis to pursue a close reading of the figuration of the black female singularity in the work of Lawrence. She approaches Jacob Lawrence's conceptualization and subsequent representation of the African-American community-in-the-making through an analysis of this series of panels that narrates the travels, hardships, family-life, and community-building of the black female figures. Through a parallel reading of his interviews and the reception of his work by contemporary critics who attended more to the aesthetic and less to the historical, social, and political origins of his work, Gsoels-Lorensen demonstrates how Jacob Lawrence's work is a reconstellation of the African-American community-in-the-making with the existing community, hegemonic practices, and official policies of white America. Lawrence's work appears to be motivated by the persistent question of the human, which now arises in the name of those constituencies whose humanity has been put under erasure. Starting with a critical appraisal of Edward Said's posthumously I{ published book Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Radhakrishnan's "Edward Said's Literary Humanism" works through a series of challenging questions, interrogating Said's relation to the work of Freud (whom he says Said "defends"), Conrad (for whom Said shows "appreciation") and Fanon (toward whom Said is "unfair"), thus reconstellating Said's relation to Eurocentrism, essentialism, language, poststructuralism and the future in order to offer an understanding of Said's "heroic" effort at finding the in-between of being human without abandoning the passion of the unique human being Radhakrishnan knew Said to be. Said's thinking takes the risk of such contradictions and deviations. One such moment is definitive in Humanism and Democratic

-

10

Karavanta & Morgan

( Criticism, when he announces the need to again engage a humanist praxis "in the name of humanism." Radhakrishnan's essay turns to that moment of contradiction in Said's last response to this persistent· question of humanism in his work and argues that such an invocation of humanism is a call that is trapped in a kind of essentialism unless it is consistently accompanied by a critique that questions the higher order of the human that this call harbors. By way of Frantz Fanon's tho(oughgoing problematization of colonial humanism and his consequent gesture towards a "new humanism," Radhakrishnan argues that Said's ~ompliance with humanism in the name of "critical intentional choice," exculpates humanism a little too easily, a little too untheoretically. In her essay, "In that Precarious Exilic Realm: Edward Said's Andalusian Journeys," Tabea Alexa Linhard reads Said's analysis of Andalusia as the site that calls for a theorization of the democratic praxis required by the cohabitation and synergy of the Muslim, jewish, and Christian cultures in Andalusia. As the global hybrid connotes the travelling constituencies' inevitable and mUltiple crossings of territorial, conceptual, cultural and identity borders, Linhard takes Said's suggestion that "the point of theory is to travel" quite literally; reading his writing on his time-travel to Andalusia, Linhard observes the impulse toward nostalgia for convivencia that not even Said's text can avoid as he imagines Andalusia's past as a space of tolerance but experiences it as a world of ghosts, specters that haunt the promise of "home." Linhard's essay provides a historical and literary analysis of a locality the historical transfiguration of which is determined by global flows, migrations and the living-with of the Arab, Jewish, and Christian constituencies, a particular '~" that we are taught to think of as impossible today. This idea of l)J~notonly through a predetermined settlement of differences but often through conflict and friction, is also a historically and politically realistic response to the metaphysical and universal implications of a Western humanism rooted however in the identity politics of the white man. Linhard proposes that this condition of convivencia has formulated not only the past but also the present conditions of living-with both in Spain and Europe.

r

X

The second part of our collection entitled "Affirming Humanism: Secular Criticism and Democratic Praxis" opens with Bruce Robbins' "Said and Secularism" that further complicates the discussion of home in I, Said by emphasizing Said's sense that "the homeless intellectual [serves] as a model for the normative subject" for whom exile is the state of secularism that the humanist embodies. Robbins is not so comfortable with these correspondences, offering instead an emphasis on Said's real-life

Introduction: Humanism, Hybridity and Democratic Praxis

11

actions that constitute his "effort"; he claims, "Said's appeals to effort are ways of mediating between humanism and poststructuralism, opening each up to the other." Robbins' focus on Said's effort as an intellectual who speaks truth to power (attending to his multiple commitments as an intellectual, an academic, a teacher and a man of Palestinian origins never ceasing to speak out about the conditions of his people) suggests that the exilic consciousness is no~qJfus 0llgr.cmif!. bUU.l1l ,exi§!!:I!tial ai!""' polffica] conditlonthat demarcates ~d_
12

Karavanta & Morgan

is articulated in the works of Bertolt Brecht and GUnter Grass. His analysis of their works in and against Said's philology and Derridean futures interrogates whether-at what stage and on what stage-the act of literary interpretation can ever be truly political. One of the important questions Lambropoulos raises concerns the relationship between the politics of interpretation and the question of the political, as the question that relates to the invention and reinvention of civic life. His analysis of Brecht 'and Grass demonstrates how critical praxis, albeit passionate and committed like the one that Said employs in his writings or Brecht practices in..his theatre, may actually be stagnant if not oppositional to the actual social and political practices that make the political claim or even revolutionize democracy (as his analysis of the historical context of Brecht's production of Coriolanus demonstrates). Through Brecht and Grass, Lambropoulos interrogates the ways tragedy can play out this relationship between affirmation and rupture, aesthetics and politics, interpretation and political praxis in the name of a humanism between as he puts it "hubris and heroism" that can still remember the human after the fall, bereft of power or even abandoned to inhabit the ruins of the polis left behind. This is a critical point ihat argues against Said's faith in a philological praxis and instead shows how it is possible to be engaged with a militant politics of interpretation that lapses into another metaphysical or "totalizing circle," as Lambropoulos calls it, thus demonstrating how this kind of politics of interpretation is not adequate without a deconstructive praxis that will strive against the affirmation of metaphysical discourse. Stathis Gourgouris opens his essay "Rethinking Humanism" with the fJ- claim that the question of humanism invokes the necessary, though paradoxical, relationship between the universal and the particular and requires that the fear to speak not only about but also in the name of the universal be overcome. Gourgouris recognizes the risk and responsibility that such a claim entails but finds any interrogation of the term humanism impossible, especially now in a continuously growing global world, unless it engages the problematic history and multivalent presence of the term on both the particular and universal plateaus. It is through this complex histo of this term that Gourgouris turns to Said's critique and definition of umanis praxis. For Gourgouris, Said's gesture to humanism in Humanism ana Democratic Criticism is not inconsistent with his earlier work, not even Orientalism. for in his last ~t Said once again makes the effort to engage the term in its complexity.\I.aking a rather different route from both Spanos and Radhakrishnan's essays, Gourgouris' reading formulates the position that Said's reading of humanism, as a real example of "late style," is neither a complete rejection of theory nor an uninterrogated

Introduction: Humanism, Hybridity and Democratic Praxis

13

celebration of a facile and even neo-liberal humanism, like the kind Said relentlessly critiqued throughout his work. Faithful to the need to rethink the universal from within the particular (and vice versa) and simultaneously to oppose the universalist rhetoric that absents difference, Said returns to humanism, according to Gourgouris, as a site of complexity, a site that unavoidably intertwines the particular Wtth the iiii1versal, the "utopian with the political," and the "skeptical" with a viable democratic pra§Gourgouris suggests that Said mai~~ins this sensillve balance by bemg always already aware of the contradtcl1ons and the paradoxes that it involves and always already allentive to exploring the question of the human through the praxis of what Said defmes as "secular criticism" and what Gourgouris calls an "antinomian humanism." This "non-humanist humanism" that Said's work offers as an example of intellectual effort-to invoke Bruce Robbins' analysis of the concept of effort-and ethics does indeed invite a workable affiliation with a renewed deconstructive reading of the term, like the one Derrida proposes in his ater work. Gourgouris pursues this workable affiliation through three ropositions about humanism made by Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, whose different positions-temporarily reconstellated in this essay-unconceal the three-dimensional and historically entrenched interpretation of the concepts of the human, humanism, and humanity with Iwhich the question of the human is laden. Gourgouris contemplates the connectedness of these terms and explores the realm of the major difference by which they are marked and which distinguishes the human from its radical other, the animal. Gourgouris closes his essay by offering three propositions about "human animality," a condition that destabilizes the traditional binaries between human and animal and complicates the question of the human as the question not only of being, logos, reason, and politics but also the question of life, body, desire and being-with, not only with itself but also with its others. >( The response t~ humanism in the 20 th century is given historical footing in Efterpi Mitsi's study of the model of Renaissance humanism and her etymological and literary analysis of the idea of the humanist as represented in Sir Thomas More's Utopia. Her essay, "The Utopian Humanist," argues that the concerns-political, social, and intellectual--Qf the Renaissance humanist are mirrored in Said's "secular humanism" as Utopia provides a form of critique that works deconstructively to subvert "the affirmations and certainties voiced by the interlocutors in the text." Hence, More "inaugurates a humanist aesthetics founded on the questioning and questing mind." In response to Said's call for a humanist prax~•..!hat. can open the possibilities for lIdemocratic critique.:~t _

•

_ . . . . . ....."..

~..

•

~

7-.

•..

14

Karavanta & Morgan

restrained by its ~ry social and political reality, Mitsi marks a oond befweenllie political humanisms'of'lJo"th the Renaissance and the th 20 century: the refusal to forget the human. By grounding this refusill in a close reading of the contradictions and fissures of More's text, Mitsi does ot propose a nostalgic and uncritical return to humanism; in fact, More's Utopia emerges as the critical site where the question of the human and ] the praxis of the political as a human-made and human-ordered praxis are econstellated to be re-conceptualized and engaged with risk. By being attentive to More's refusal to offer any comforting responses to these questions, Mitsi proposes a "tum" to this critically engaged Renaissance humanism as a "tum" that should be reconstellated in the present with all of its complexities and paradoxes laid bare to critique. Samir Dayal's "Ethical Antihumanism" opens the third and final part entitled "The Global Hybrid and the Call for Critique: Rethinking the Human and Her/His Abode" and offers an attentive reading of Frantz Fanon's "proleptic deconstruction"-or even destruction--{)f the tenn humanism that gives its place to the praxis of an ethical anti-humanism that can address the needs, dreams and visions of Fanon's ''New Man." anon proposes a strategic anti-humanism knowledgeable of the history of f~umanism that will focus on the promise of an anti-humanist ontology. Dayal's reading of Fanon's proposed ontology of a New Man that is yetto-come not as a reply to the inherited tradition of humanism, an aporetic subject that remains behind after the project of deconstruction is over, but as the embodiment of the promise of and hope for a new condition of being is an immediate and alternative reply to the questions that the temporary reconstellation of Said and Derrida's use and analysis of humanism opens. Dayal's reading ofFanon articulates an "other" ontology that, incomplete as it may be due to Fanon's tragic and early death, is fundamental to the question of humanism inscribed in the long history of western metaphysics and its discourses that have attempted to dehumanize the black body. Dayal's elaboration of Fanon's ontological project as an "ethical antihumanism" or an "ethics of antihumanism" or "ethics of subjectivation" that binds together the three dimensions of the human subject, namely, the psychic, the political and the collective and which is manifested as a counter-ontological and political project that does not simply interrupt the status quo but really constitutes a new statement and deconstructs the inherent binary dynamics of the set up between a faith in humanism yet-to-come and a rejection of the tenn and its practices tout court. By focusing on the need for an epistemic violence that will destroy the binary between the black and the white constituency, Fanon, as Dayal proposes, makes the effort of "fusing the ethics of psychoanalysis with the

r

Introduction: Humanism, Hybridity and Democratic Praxis

15

ethics of the political" in order to articulate a new ontology past but not oblivious to the binary politics and policies of the western humanism that has condemned to the black man to a condition of inhumanity and injustice. In "Towards a Western Humanism Made to the Measure of Those Recently Recognized as Human," Joan Anim-Addo attends to Sylvia Wynter's claim for a reconfiguration of humanism "now made to. the measure of the world." Taking a similar path to Fanon's proposition for the envisioning of a new human but also breaking away from it to articulate the question not only of human as man but human as woman, Wynter's work operates as an epistemological break that posits a new standpoint, one often neglected or cast into historical oblivion by the grand narratives or anti-narratives of history often written by men. Anim-Addo rethinks the question of the human from the perspective of what it is to be human on the edge of the recognition of the complexity of herlhis humanity and in the era of global capitalism. Following Wynter, AnimAddo argues that this recent recognition produces new discourses and epistemologies that do not simply challenge the philosophy of western humanism and narrate what bell hooks has called "the narratives of struggle" but also operate as a "minority discourse" that resists its marginalized and peripheral role and instead undercuts the master narratives of history, blurring the borders between texts, agents, voices, and identities. Instead of simply resisting or opposing, this minority discourse affinns the conditions and claims of those humans "whose humanity was only recently recognized" and reconfigures the question of tile human now made to the measure of the heterogeneous, albeit still greatly uneven, world. The questions of course remain, as Aninl-Addo aptly observes, as to which constituencies are "listening across the gap" and when the condition of a real dialogue will truly engage the question of the human in the name of a humanity of all humans. Giovanna Covi's "La Dividua-a Gendered Figuration for a Planetary Humanism" considers the question of gendered agency within the matrix of global powers. It foregrounds "figurations" (Donna Haraway) drawn from feminist literary and philosophical sources and proposes "ta dividua" as a figure of resistance to patriarchal, imperial-capitalistic globalization. The purpose of this essay is to contribute to developing a discourse that resists the association of the individual as a human subject with a singular masculine self and proposes instead a representation of subjectivity that struggles to counter the separation of Self from Other. With this aim, the essay coins the tenn ta dividua-a feminine (embodied) noun which is offered as referring to that which can be divided, is relational, multiple,

16

Karavanta & Morgan

fractioned. La dividua is Covi's new concept through which a resistance to the normative human is enacted, it is the "figuration of resistance to sexist, racist, and imperialistic globalization," and it is also the sign of ariother kind of being in the world. Asserting herself amidst the "worldiness" of Said and "differance" of Derrida, Covi claims a space for the feminist questioning of humanism by suggesting a need for another definition of the human than the discourses of philosophy ("the philosophical human") and politics ("the political human right") have thus far provided; in doing so, Covi's essay offers analyses both of literary texts and of political associations that represent dynamics in which humanity acts as that which does not exclude-beyond the limits of identity and individualism, beyond the exclusion of the animal and earth-as collective life is lived in conversation and dialogue, the shared communication that, even between an animal and a person, is a gift. Thinking through poetry is more promising of transformation for us than thinking along the lines that power and history have drawn and enforced. Like Said and other critics, Covi depends upon the literary as a human production that may, as Morrison's The Bluest Eye attests, give us the site of seeing another way of being and thus creating fue potential for an ethical relation to the other as does AnimAddo's revision of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko provide us with lmoinda an operatic aporia, but one that is also the site of another way of being and ending. In reconstellating these texts, characters, and theorists (including Ronell, hooks, Sedgwick, and Butler, among others), Covi makes a strong argument for her "impossible possible" dream of conversations with the world. In his essay, "Said, Derrida, and the Undecidable Human: In the Name of Inhabitancy," Robert P. Marzec provides a critical analysis of a "philosophy of geography" as a narrative that is attentive to the issue and event of inhabitancy, which is Marzec's provocative reply to this "undecidability," as he puts it, that demarcates the indissoluble and problematic relationship between Said's humanism as a political praxis and Derrida's antihumanism as an ethical praxis. Marzec's analysis of inhabitancy brings the political and the ethical together and rethinks the question of the human in the name of herlhis right to and for inhabitancy. Marzec reads "ontopology" as emerging from the "uneven development" and the impossible and yet possible living off the land beyond and within the structure of the nation at a time when that structure is being destabilized and transformed under the weight of global capital. Here, Derrida's approach to the ontological and Said's critique that grounds philosophy in the geographical both are related to inhabitancy as a condition of being, living, transforming, occupying, claiming and

X

Introduction: Humanism, Hybridity and Democratic Praxis

17

belongj.Qg d~ land. Marzec restores the connection between "humanism, t:liideCidabl Ity and geography," a connection, he argues, which has been denied. The collection ends with Mina Karavanta and Nina Morgan's Another Insistence': Humanism and the Aporia of Community" in which Karavanta and Morgan examine how today's humanism, bound as it is to new questions of community that arise out of an accelerated condition of global mobilities, is overdue for a radical rethinking. Such a rethinking would entail a commitment from those in the Humanities to consider how their own research, course offerings and reading practices participate in promulgating rather than alleviating the pressures and problems of nationalisms and identities and thus ironically forget the human and its futures. In reconstellating Said's "democratic criticism" with Derrida's imaginative grammar in relation to a humanism-to-come, this essay interrogates the impasse of justice and identity, sovereignty and rights under the auspices of globalization and articulates the problematic of community, hybridity, and belonging, ending with the hope that the site of critique will sustain the question of the human and that its abode will "be interpreted and imagined as radically heterogeneous and hybrid-as it is lived." In this essay, Derrida and Said appear less as idealists and more as visionaries whose sense of the self-critical community open to the other (and thus recognizing the other already within itself) will lead us to a more conscientious-more viable-other kind of being in community with each other. The essays in this collection address the need to rethink together Said and Derrida's oeuvres through the fields of theory, philosophy, art, and literature as the predominant and self-critical forces that both produce and provoke the institutions of humanistic practice. Such reconstellating might thus invoke discomfort where cross-cultural and inter-cultural contacts thrive in harmony and bliss but also suffer or survive rupture and violence. Through the temporal and yet challenging affiliations created between these two thinkers and the critical analyses of the contributors to this collection, we suggest that the critical approach of reconstellation and the condition of the global hybrid are not to be seen as availing us of cohesive or umbrella tenns that group together all kinds of discrepant experiences thus regulating and evening out their unevenness. For us, hybridity is not the name of a process that happily and soothingly integrates and fuses dIfferent cultures thus undoing the dominating force of the universal and erasmg processes of homogenization. It rather names the complexities that anse from the simple fact that this world is inhabited by incommensurable differences represented by constituencies whose disjunctive histories and

#',,,

18

Karavanta & Morgan

temporalities persist despite predictable and political attempts to conceive and analyze them as simple constituent elements of a globality that itself reports a readable narrative, a logically traceable identity, and a coherept meaning. Thus our goal for this collection is to rethink Humanism through a hybrid practice of analysis that refuses and refutes the methodology of subscribing to one unified and thereby insulated critical perspective as this moment of globalization, this condition of concurrency, incites a heterogeneity of voices that may excite new and always already "uneven" insights through the creative reconstellating of supposedly incompatible concepts-and thinkers.

Notes I See R. Radhakrishnan's Theory in an Uneven World for an interesting and politically engaging analysis of this term. Here we draw on Theodor W. Adorno's analysis of the concept of constellation in the second part of his Negative Dialectics. Adorno argues that concepts bear the traces of processes of meaning, even before they enter other contexts, to add, change or challenge meaning. Being the outcome of complex processes of meaning construction, concepts thus engage objects to "illuminate" (Adorno 162) them, to unconceal, to follow Heidegger, those yet unseen aspects of the objects. This engagement is always already double: it is engagement both with the complex process of meaning inherent in the concept and the unseen aspects "stored in" the object (163). Constellation is thus the act that entwines the concept with the object on the premise that "[t]he history locked in the object can only be delivered by a knowledge mindful of the historic positional value of the object in its relation to other objects-by the actualization and concentration of something which is already known and is transformed by that knowledge" (163). Hence for Adorno, who is attentive to Walter Benjamin's theorization of constellation in The Origin of German Tragedy as the act that "take[s] the very concept of truth for a constellation" (Adorno 164), "constellation" is a theoretical act that "circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a wellguarded safe-deposit box" (163). Following Adorno, we conceptualize reconstellation as the act that does not simply recognize the imperative need for a double engagement with the history of meaning inherent in the concept but wrenches both concept and object from their contexts to temporarily and persistently disrupt those relations of attachment and affiliation that have regulated their respective meanings and functions. This temporary inoperativeness of both object and concept calls for a new act of interpretation and repetition conditioned by the field that the object and concept now temporarily share after being wrenched from their previous contexts and being thrust into each other's company. Reconstellation is this new act of interpretation and repetition: it both engages previously untried affiliations and relations and unavoidably returns to the

Introduction: Humanism, Hybridity and Democratic Praxis

19

previously set contexts from which concepts and objects are wrenched. It thus destabilizes and critically interprets the relations that bind the concepts to the objects, yet again and from the beginning. J See Tabea Alexa Linhard's analysis of this term in her essay that appears in this collection (Chapter Four). 4 See Aamir Mufti's "Critical Secularism: A Reintroduction for Perilous Times" and William V. Spanos' analysis of Mufti's inversion of Said's terms in his essay that appears in this collection (Chapter One). 5 Said, in an interview with Salman Rushdie in 1986, makes this observation of himself, while Derrida makes this claim in The Other Heading. 6 In an interview with Michael Phillips of "Social Thought," Said says " ...we really are living in a tiny world in which the principle idea, and this is really where I think my work as an intellectual has led me, the principle idea is the notion of interdependence, that there's no way of having an experience by yourself, that all experiences are shared experiences". http://www.well.coml-mp/t20.html. 7 See J. Hillis Miller's "Derrida Enisled" (in The Late Derrida) for this phrase, which Miller offers from one of Derrida's (previously unpublished) seminars. 8 See Joseph A. Buttigieg's "Teaching English and Developing a Critical Knowledge of the Global," where he states the need for small readings that attend to the complexity of the global and thus counteract the global as another metaphysical and thus dangerously homogeneous term. Also, see Radhakrishnan on globality in his Theory in an Uneven World, where he proposes that an understanding of globality/globalization requires a systematic critical analysis that remains anti-systemic, which is what this praxis of reconstellation that we propose ~romises and, we hope, achieves. It is difficult if not impossible to list the long line of conflicting discourses that undertake the theoretical task of critically engaging the event and phenomenon of globalization. Amir Samin's Obsolescent Capitalism: Contemporary Politics and Global Disorder (2003); Saskia Sassen's Globalization and its Discontents (1995); Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi's (eds.) The Cultures of Globalization (1998); Walter D. Mignolo's Local Histories/Global Designs (2000); R. Radhakrishnan's Theory in an Uneven World (2003); and Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri's Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004) are a few of the different and conflicting analyses of globality and its narratives. '0 See Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan's "Global Identities. Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality" for a powerful analysis of the concept of "transnational" as a pivotal term that can "address the asymmetries of the f,lobalization process" (664). For a cnllcal elaboration of the indissoluble and complex relationship between cosm?politanism and hybridity, see Bruce Robbins' "Introduction Part I: Actually EXlstmg Cosmopolitanism" and "Comparative Cosmopolitanisms" and Pheng Cheah's. "Introduction Part II: The Cosmopolitical-Today" and "Given Culture: Rethmkmg Cosmopolitical Freedom in Transnationalism" in Cosmopolitics (1998). 12 S ee h'IS essay in this collection (Chapter I).

20

Karavanta & Morgan

13 In "Collectivities" in Death of a Discipline, Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak, following Derrida's tum to the "law of the social as such" (Spivak 28) In his Politics ofFriendship, proposes that Derrida's concept of a "yet-to-come" is not a "future anterior, where one promises no future present but attends upon what will have happened as Ii result of one's work" (29) but (and here she quotes from Derrida's Politics of Friendship) a new kind of "'perhaps,' 'the possibilization of [an] impossible possible [that] must remain at one and the same time as undecidable-and therefore indecisive-as the future itself''' (Derrida qtd in Spivak 29). In agreement with Spivak's proposition that Derrida's positions slfould not be dismissed as "rhetorical extravagances" (29), we offer an analysis of the relationship between what we call Derrida's "imaginative grammar" and the political possibility of a community-yet-to come through the praxis of critique in our last chapter of this volume.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 1973. Balibar, Etienne. We, the People ofEurope? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Trans. James Swenson. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004. Buttigieg, Joseph A. "Teaching English and Developing a Critical Knowledge of the GlobaL" boundary 2 26.2, 1999: 45-57. Canclini, Garcia Nestor. Hybrid Cultures. Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Trans. Christopher L. Chiappari & Silvia L. Lopez. London & Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Cheah Pheng. "Given Culture: Rethinking Cosmopolitical Freedom in Transnationalism." Cosmopolitics. Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation. Eds. Pheng Cheah & Bruce Robbins. London & Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Cheah, Pheng & Robbins, Bruce (eds.). Cosmopolitics. Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation. London & Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Derrida, Jacques. The Other Heading. Reflections on Today's Europe. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael B. Naas. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992. - . "Passages." Points...Interviews 1974-1994. Ed. Elisabeth Weber. Trans. Peggy Kamuf, et aL Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Grewal, Inderpal & Caren Kaplan. "Global Identities. Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 7.4 (2001): 663-679.

Introduction: Humanism, Hybridity and Democratic Praxis

21

Jameson Fredric & Miyoshi Masao. The Cultures of Globalization. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1998. Mignolo, Walter D. Local Histories/Global Designs. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Miller, Hillis J. "Derrida Enisled." The Late Derrida. Eds. W.J.T. Mitchell & Arnold 1. Davidson. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007. Mufti, Aamir R. "Critical Secularism: A Reintroduction for Perilous Times," in Critical Secularism, ed. Aamir R. Mufti, a special issue of boundary 2, voL31. 2 (2004): 1-9. Negri, Antonio & Hardt, Michael. Empire. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000. _. Multitude. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004. Radhakrishnan. R. Theory in an Uneven World. Malden & Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. Rushdie, Salman. "On Palestinian Identity: A Conversation with Edward Said." Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. Said, Edward. Interview with Michael Phillips. "Social Thought." February 1991. http://www.well.com!user/mp/t20.html. _. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Palgrave, 2004. Samir, Amin. Obsolescent Capitalism: Contemporary Politics and Global Disorder. Trans. Patrick Camiller. New York & London: Zed Books, 2003. Sassen, Saskia. Globalization and its Discontents. New York: The New Press, 1995. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death ofa Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

~

..

g

Edward Said's Humanism and American Exceptionalism after 9/11

25

I

CHAPTER ONE EDWARD SAID'S HUMANISM AND AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM: AN INTERROGATION AFTER 9/11 WILLIAM V. SPANOS

In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci says, "The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself' as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces without leaving an inventory." The only available English translation inexplicably leaves Gramsci's comment at that, whereas in fact Gramsci's Italian text concludes by adding, "therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory." -Edward Said, Orientalism The historical sense gives rise to three uses that oppose and correspond to the Platonic modalities of history. The first is parodic, directed against reality, and opposes the theme of history as reminiscence or recognition; the second is dissociative, directed against identity, and Opposes history given as continuity or representative of a tradition; the third is sacrificial, directed against truth, and opposes history as knowledge. They imply a use of history that severs its connection to memory, its metaphysical and anthropological model, and constructs a counter memory-a transformation of history into a totally different form of time. -Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History"

Edward Said's posthumously published Humanism and Democratic Criticism is a deeply problematic book. Whatever his intention-was it to underscore his legacy in the face of his imminent death or simply another "raid on the inarticulate I With shabby equipment always deteriorating! In the general mess of imprecision of feeling"?-it will be, indeed, seems already to have been, understood by his legion of followers as a last will and testament to his life-long commitment to the democratizing dynamics of humanist inquiry. I Which is to say, an interpretation that, astonishingly, once and for all relegates to oblivion a half-century history, following the catastrophe of World War I, that bore persuasive witness, however exaggerated their claims, to the disclosure by Western post-structuralist thinkers, from Martin Heidegger through Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Francois Lyotard, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthes, and certain French feminists, to Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatlari, and Gayatri Spivak, among many others,2 of the complicity of Western humanism with the depredations of the rule of Man: the selfidentical subject, technology, patriarchy, nationalism, racism, imperialism. This is not to say that this tacit burial of poststructuralist theory should be attributed to Said's posthumously published "defense" of humanism and humanist studies. It is to suggest, instead, that, whatever his reasons, his refusal to encounter this resonant history or, rather, his apparent cavalier indifference to it, has I) obfuscated the meaning of the very term he would redeem and thus inadvertently rendered his last book the object of contestation between those traditional "liberal" humanist who have always accommodated difference to the anthropo-logos and those post-humanists, who, by way of deconstructing the humanist tradition, have been attempting to develop a different understanding of humanity (and the studia humanitatis), one that acknowledges its historical contingency-its freedom from both external and internalized transcendentals-or, in Said's terms, its radical "secularity." In an equally important and related way, Said's dismissal of the history of the poststructuralist critique of humanism has also blurred 2) the symptomatic directives for the critique of American-style democracy, the very critique his recuperated humanism is intended to undertake, precipitated by what he reiteratively characterizes as the epochal "changed political atmosphere" that "has overtaken the United States and, to varying degrees, the rest of the world" in the wake of "the events of September 11,2001" (Humanism 16),3 by which I take him to mean the Bush Administration's unleashing of the "war on terror"always latent in the exceptionalism of American democracy. This,

26

William V. Spanos

according to a certain reading of the poststructuralist movement at large, is the polyvalent global violence that brings to its end (in both sense of the word) the otherwise accommodational logical economy of Enlightenment or humanist modernity, and, in so doing, calls not simply for a radical revision of what the humanist tradition has taken to be human, but also of the idea of humanism as a mode of inquiring into being in all its manifestations. In the remarks that follow, I will address the thorny question of Edward Said's humanism in Humanism and Democratic Criticism, not specifically in terms of Jacques Derrida's critique of humanism, which is the focus of this book, but in terms of his alleged quarrel with the "anti-humanism" of poststructuralist theory at large. I think, however, that what I say about Said's troubled relationship with the poststructuralists is, mutatis mutandis, applicable to his work's relationship to Derrida's. I also think that it contributes to the editors' project: putting two major postrnodern thinkers whose work has been read as antagonistic into productive dialogue.

II What, more specifically, is it about post-structuralist theory that, according to Said, renders their criticism unworldly and politically impotent? Following from his famous essays in The World, the Text, and the Critic, not least the one on new American "Left" criticism and "Criticism between Culture and System," Said attributes this at the outset of Humanism and Democratic Criticism to its "anti-humanism": [D]uring the 1960s and 1970s the advent of French theory in the humanistic departments of American and English universities had brought about a severe if not crippling defeat of what was considered traditional humanism by the forces of structuralism and post-structuralism, both of which professed the death of man-the-author and asserted the preeminence of antihumanist systems such as those found in the work of Levi-Strauss, Foucault himself, and Roland Barthes. The sovereignty of the subject-to use the technical phrase for what Enlightenment thought did with Descartes's notion of the cogito, which was to make it the center of all human knowledge and hence capable of essentializing thought in itselfwas challenged by what Foucault and Levi-Strauss carried forward from the work of thinkers such as Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, and the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. This group of pioneers showed, in effect, that the existence of systems of thinking and perceiving transcended the powers of individual subjects, individual humans who were inside those systems (systems such as Freud's "unconscious" or Marx's "capital") and therefore had no power over them, only the choice either to use or be used by them.

Edward Said's Humanism and American Exceptionalism after 9/11

27

This of course flatly contradicts the core of humanistic thougbt, and bence the individual cogito was displaced, or demoted, to the status of illusory autonomy or fiction. (9-10) What we find in Said's extraordinary telescoped characterization of the advent of theory in the 1960s and 1970s is a curious, yet persistent reversal, one that is drawn to our attention by his rather arbitrary equation of structuralism and its practitioners (de Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Barthes) with post-structuralism and its practitioners (Foucault and then Barthes who became one). On the one hand, he identifies post-structuralist theory with system, which is to say, a form of essentialism (Identity) that subsumes singularities (difference: the "sovereign subject," "man-theauthor"), particularly the singularity of human being, to its telos, whereas its adherents have insistently represented poststructuralist theory as antisystemic and anti-essentialist, free of transcendental categories, whether external or internal to man: that is, to appropriate Said, as a radically secular (if not "worldly") critical practice. On the other hand, he identifies humanism with radical secularism, an anti-systemic, anti-essentialist mode of inquiry that acknowledges the singularity and sovereignty of the subject and his/her freedom to choose, whereas both the traditional humanists, by and large, have represented humanism as a universal mode of being that subsumes the singularity of human beings to the internalized transcendental category, Man or Mankind, a representation that has enabled the post-structuralists to perceive the alleged freedom of this humanist man as "illusionary autonomy or fiction." It is true, of course, as Said has insistently observed, that the early post-structuralists overdetermined the systematics of discourse--the "unconscious," "language," "capital," "disciplinarity"-and overmethodologized their theory, and, as a result, rendered their work "unworldly" "jargon-ridden," "ahistorical," indeed, impotent in the face of, if not complicitous with, the very institutions of power they were theoretically opposing. This seems to have been often willfully deliberate, as in the case of Paul de Man, and the American literary critics his (and Derrida's) deconstruction influenced. But generally it can be argued that, as I have been suggesting, this un-worldliness and political impotence was the. consequence of the failure to render the symptomatic worldliness of their theory conscious. Or, to put this less pejoratively, it was the c?nsequence of their quite justifiable early emphasis on the inordinate difficulty of breaking free from the constraints of a discourse of knOWledge production and its institutions-schools, the media, the culture industry, and so on-that represented themselves as disinterested, humane,

28

29

William V. Spanos

Edward Said's Humanism and American Exceptionalism after 9/11

and democratic and, as Foucault observed, saturated the Western body politic right down to its capillaries. This condition, which, I am claiming, goes far to explain the post-structuralists' prioritization of discourse, \¥as, not incidentally, movingly articulated long ago by Raymond Williams, a thinker Said admired for his worldliness, when, in Marxism and Literature, he reconstellated, via Althusser's poststructuralist dismantling of the Marxists' disciplinary base/superstructure model, Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony into his polyvalent diagnosis of modernity, i.e. modem Western culture:

seen that its fundamental intention is to de-construct or de-structure the (polyvalent) spatializing or structurizing (and identitarian) operations of thinking meta ta physica in order to liberate or de-colonized the differential dynamics of being, including the non-identical self, that it would subsume to its overtly coercive or, as in the case of it democratic allotrope, accommodational or incorporative totalizing will to power. It is not, 1 think, to post-structuralist theory as such that Said's severe criticism applies; it is, rather, to its abuses. And Said, as I have noted, often, if inconsistently, points to this in passing. What, then, of the humanism that Said would recuperate from the critique of the post-structuralists? Here, again, we enter a rather murky terrain, already signaled by his intention to bypass the "history of humanism," an "exploration of all its possible meanings," and "its metaphysical relationship to a prior being" in favor of offering a humanism that is "a usable praxis for [contemporary] intellectuals and academics who want to know what they are doing, what they are committed to as scholars, and who want also to connect these principles to the world in which they live as citizens" (Humanism 6). All too cognizant of the centrality-and power-{)f the critique of anthropologism in the poststructuralist interrogation of Western modernity, Said does not by any means ignore this criticism of humanism and the studia humanitatis. He writes, echoing, in a more historically specific context, the poststructuralists, that

The concept of hegemony often, in practice, resembles these definitions [of ideology], but it is distinct in its refusal to equate consciousness with the articulate formal system which can be and ordinarily is abstracted as "ideology." It of course does not exclude the articulate and formal meanings, values and beliefs which a dominant class develops and propagates. But it does not equate these with consciousness, or rather it does not reduce consciousness to them. Instead it sees the relations of domination and subordination, in their forms as practical consciousness, as in effect a soturation ofthe whole process ofliving-not only ofpolitical and economic activity, nor only ofmanifest social activity, but ofthe whole substance of lived identities and relationships, to such a depth that the pressures and limits ofwhat can ultimately be seen as a specific economic, political, and cultural system seem to most ofus the pressures and limits of simple experience and common sense. Hegemony is then not only the articulate upper level of "ideology," nor are its forms of control only those ordinarily seen as "manipulation" or "indoctrination." It is a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living: our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world. It is a lived system of meanings and values----{;onstitutive and constituting-which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming. It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people in the society, a sense of absolute because experienced reality beyond which it is very difficult for most members ofthe society to move, in most areas of their lives. It is, that is to say, in the strongest sense a "culture," but a culture which has also to be seen as the lived dominance and subordination of particular classes. (109- I 10; emphasis added) If, as Said implies, the post-structuralists were too pessimistic about the possibilities of human agency, it could be said as well, given the pervasively acknowledged inscription of the knowledge/power nexus in the body of Western society, that Said is too optimistic about these possibilities. Be that as it may, it is simply an oversimplification to represent poststructuralist theory as such determinism. If it is acknowledged that post-structuralist theory is anti-metaphysical, it will be

[i]t must be remembered that antihumanism took hold on the United States intellectual scene partly because of widespread revulsion with Vietnam War [In France it was the "events of May '68," (my addition)]. Part of that revulsion was the emergence of a resistance movement to racism, imperialism generally, and the dry-as-dust academic humanities that had for years represented an unpolitical, unworldly, and oblivious (sometimes even manipulative) attitude to the present, all the while adamantly extolling the virtues of the past, the untouchability of the canon, and the superiority of "how we used to do it" [...]. (12-13) This superiority, according to Said, was the stance these elitist traditionalist humanities adopted to ward off "the disquieting appearance on the intellectual and academic scene of such things as women's, ethnic, gay, cultural, and postcolonial studies and, above all ...a loss of interest in and the vitiation of the core idea of the humanities" (13). Alluding, no doubt to Allan Bloom's jeremiad against this invasion, Said, concludes, ''The centrality of the great literary texts was now threatened not only by popular culture but by the heterogeneity of upstart or insurgent phtlosophy; politics, linguistics, psychoanalysis, and anthropology" (13).

30

William V. Spanos

Edward Said's Humanism and American Exceptionalism after 9/11

But rather than attributing these disabling limitations-the essentialism or universalism, elitism, nostalgia, unworldliness, and, in the context of it crisis, the indirect reactionary socio-politics to which the poststructuralist pointed-to the idea of humanism as such, Said attributes them to the abuse of humanism by it modem practitioners, who range from Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and T. S. Eliot to Allan Bloom, Dinesh D'Souza, and Roger Kimball: ,

Walter Benjamin's famous "dictum that every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism," Said goes on to write:

But it is worth insisting, in this [the American context] as well as otper cases, that attacking the abuses of something is not the same thing as dismissing or entirely destroying that thing. So, in my opinion, it has been the abuse of humanism that discredits some of humanism's practitioners without discrediting humanism itself. Yet in the past four of five years, an enormous outpouring of books and articles has, in a vast overreaction to this purported or attempted antihumanism-which in most cases was an often idealistic critique of humanism's misuses in politics and public policy, many of which were in regard to non-European people and immigrants-gone on to diagnose such lugubrious improbabilities as the death of literature or the failure of humanism to respond robustly enough to the new challenges. (13) The problem with this way of articulating "humanism's sphere" is not simply that it is consonant with much of the critique of humanism made by the "antihumanist" poststructuralists; it is also, and equally important, that it compels us to ask what is the nature of the earlier and more authentic humanism this "bad" modern humanism-which he often refers to ambiguously as "classic Eurocentric humanist thought" (43)--abuses, while at the same time denying his reader a clear account of this abused essence of humanism by having decided not to proffer a history of the meaning of the word. In the process of his critique of the classic humanism of Babbitt to Bloom, Said does, of course, refer to and identify with humanists from the Renaissance to modernity-Erasmus, Rabelais, Coli di Rienzi, Aretino, Montaigne, Thomas More, Vico, Leo Spitzer, Erich Auerbach, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Richard Poirier, among others. But nowhere in his book does he address these earlier figures in such a way as to clearly indicate that they collectively constitute a humanist tradition that has been abused by the modern humanists who are the objects of his severe criticism. For example, after invoking the Renaissance humanists Erasmus, Rabelais, and More (without discriminating between their inordinately different visions of humanity) as ancestors of this good humanism, he indicts other well known Renaissance humanists, as well as those Americans who celebrated the "founding fathers," as precursors of the modern Eurocentric humanists who have abused humanism. Invoking

31

[Humanism] is being required to take account of what, in its high Protestant mode [the Amoldian tradition, I take it], it had either repressed or deliberately ignored. New historians of the classical humanism of the early Renaissance... have at last begun to examine the circumstances in which iconic figures like Petrarch and Boccaccio lauded the "human" and yet were not even stirred into opposition to the Mediterranean slave trade. And after decades of celebrating the American "founding fathers" and heroic national figures, there is at last some attention being paid to their dubious connections to slavery, the elimination of the Native Americans, and the exploitation of nonlandowning, nonmale populations. There is a straight line between these once-occluded figures in the carpet and Frantz Fanon's comment that "the Graeco-Roman statue [of humanism] is crumbling in the colonies." (46-47) The humanists of the past who seem, above all, to synecdochically constitute the kind of humanism Said espouses against the "classical" abusers of humanism in Humanism and Democratic Criticism, are, as we might expect from his previous work, Giambattista Vico, Leo Spitzer, and Erich Auerbach. And this is because they have the "philological" method in common. I will return later to Said's effort to retrieve philology into the present occasion, a philology, as he wryly notes, which is considered by modem critics as the "most unmodern of any of the branches of learning associated with humanism" (57). Here, I want to comment all too briefly, and perhaps at the risk of seeming ungrateful, on Said's well-known admiration for Auerbach's magisterial work Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, more specifically, to consider what it is, above all, about Auerbach's masterpiece that he admires. Deciding this is obviously no easy task. There is Auerbach's extraordinary erudition: his cOlrunand of the Romances languages, the enormous scope and depth of his knowledge of the European literary tradition from Homer to Virginia Woolf, of the theological/philosophical, cultural (the tension between the Hellenic and Judaic influences), and historical ("worldly") conditions out of which this literature emerged, his humane attitude towards its various representations of "reality," the acute discriminations his careful "philological" orientation enabled, and his visibly heroic effort to render the humanistic project productive of new knowledge, an act of repetition rather than of recollection. But obviously, these are in some degree or other subsumed by the resonant insights about Europe and European humanism that Auerbach's exile from his native country during World War II, as Said's repeated appropriation of the lines from Hugh of

32

William V. Spanos

Edward Said's Humanism and American Exceptionalism after 9/11

St. Victor that Auerbach cites "as a model for anyone--man and womanwishing to transcend the restraints of imperial or national or provincial limits," (Culture 335) suggests:

secular history of the West up to T. S. Eliot testifies) was precisely a secularism that modeled its vision of the world on that of Christian theology, i.e. substituted the Anthropo-Iogos for the Theo-Iogos, internalized the external transcendental of Christianity. It is not simply, as Said says of Boccaccio, that their vision of these Renaissance humanists was limited by their Eurocentrisrn; it was also that their vision was limited by their indissolubly related anthropocentrism. One thinks here, for example, not only of the Renaissance humanists like Thomasso Campanella, who, following the Roman architect Vetruvius, imagined the circular City of the Sun (1633) and the highly disciplined life that Utopia entailed (the same could be said of More's Utopia); one also thinks of those disciplinary circular cities envisioned and enacted by the humanists of the Renaissance and of the later Enlightenment-from Filarete (14001469), Giocondo (c. 1435-1515), Cataneo (?-1569), Cerceau the Elder (1500-1584), and Daniel Speckle (1536-1589) through Vauban (16331707) to Claude-Nicholas Ledoux, whose Arc et Senan and Chaux were, according to Michel Foucault, the precursors of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, the disciplinary city of the Enlightenment, and Baron Haussmann's Paris. 5 This confusing failure is, in fact, symptomatically revealed by Amir Mufti, one of Said's most reliable commentators, in his introduction to a recent special issue of boundary 2 published shortly before the appearance of Humanism and Democratic Criticism on the legacy of Said's work as it pertains (0 secularism. Here, Mufti strategically-but true to Said's actual critical practice--pointedly reverses Said's normal usage, "secular criticism," referring to it instead as "critical secularism." That Mufti's reversal is not a minor matter is made clear by his using the revised phrase as the title of the special issue of boundary 2. And he does this in order to disclose a more authentic meaning inhering in, if not to rationalize the ambiguity of, Said's general references to "secular criticism."

It is therefore, a great source of virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether. The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong person has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his. (Hugh of St. Victor qtd. in Said 335)

What Said's (controversial) reading of Hugh of St. Victor seems to imply about Auerbach's humanism (and his philological "method") is that it is, unlike the "classical humanism" of modernity he excoriates, a radical secularism. The classical humanists, on the one hand, represent themselves and humanity, as a collective, to be at the center of and therefore at home amidst the otherwise anxiety-provoking variousness of the phenomena of the totality of earthly being on the analogy of God and His Creation in Christian theology. The exilic Auerbach, on the other hand, perceives himself and humanity as uncentred or de-centered, a cosmic exile "to whom the entire world" is a foreign place. In short, whereas the "classical humanism" of the modems is a "secularism," but a secularism that is informed by a principle of Presence (or Identity), Auerbach's, Said seems to imply, is a secularism that refuses that temptation of "otherworldly" transcendentals. For him, to be human is always to be in but at the same time estranged or alienated from the world. It is a condition, that is, as he says of the view of humanity informing the humanism of Vico, Auerbach's great humanist predecessor, "tragic," but for that very reason (as we shall see more fully later) always open-ended and humanly enriching. 4 But is this finally true of Auerbach's humanism? Despite the complexities one encounters in addressing this question, I think there is ample evidence in Auerbach's writing to suggest otherwise. Auerbach's humanism is indeed secular, as Said amply shows, but is it radically secular in the above sense? One of the consistent limitations of the enabling distinction Said insistently makes between "unworldly" and "worldly" literary criticism, between "theological" and "secular" approaches to literary texts, is that it fails by and large to clearly point out that the humanism of the Renaissance (which as Heidegger observed and the enormous influence of metropolitan Rome in the entire theological and

As a number of commentators have pointed out in recent years, Said's use of the term secular involves a displacement of its usual significations. Secular criticism in Said's reckoning is, first of all, a practice of unbelief; it is directed, however, not simply at the objects of religious piety but at secular "beliefs" as well, and, at its most ambitious, at all those moments at which thought and culture become frozen, congealed, thing-like, and selfenclosed. Above all, his concern has been with domination through the classification and management of cultures, and of human collectivities, into mutually distinct and immutable entities. To the great modem system for the classification of cultures Said gave the name Orientalism and viewed the hierarchies of this system as making the presence of a

33

-34

William V. Spanos

Edward Said's Humanism and American Exceptionalism after 911 I

"reconstructed religious impulse, a naturalized supematuralism..... Secular criticism thus struggles above all with the imposition of national (or civilizational) molds over social and cultural life, against all unmediated and absolute claims of membership in a national (or civilizational) community. This catachrestic use of the terms secular carries the implication that energies of nationalism in its very broadest sense are thoroughly religious in nature, in a sense that has nothing whatever to do with whether or not an organized religion or a certain canonized popular religious life plays any role, symbolic or organizing, in this or that nationalism. In this sense, the secularism implied in secular criticism j.s a critical secularism, as [ am calling it here, a constant unsettling and an ongoing and never-ending effort at critique, rather than a once-and-for-all declaration of the overcoming of the religious, theological, or transcendental impulse. (Mufti 2-3)

periphery, from identity t~ difference, from unity to mu!t!plicity, it is th:s anthropological/Eurocentnc base, I submIt, that determInes Auerbach s inquiry, whether in the early Dante book, or Mimesis, or the late "Philology and Weltliteratur," where, as Said notes, Auerbach, in the face of the post-World War II "dissolution of the educational and professional institutions in which he had been trained, and the emergence of 'new' nonEuropean literatures and languages," comes to feel that the Goethean (humanist) global synthesis has "become invalid or untenable" (95). This failure-and its disabling consequences-becomes patently evident in Auerbach's analysis of medieval figural interpretation and of the role that this exegetical method has played in the establishment-and the unitary history of the representation of-reality in the Western world. In "Figura" and throughout Mimesis, Auerbach focuses entirely on the positive contributions that the epochal collapse of the elitist classical Stiltrennung (separation of styles) into the sermo humilis enabled by Judeo-Christian figural interpretation, not least the giving to the lowly a history that the classical age had denied them. This brilliant philological insight into European history was, as Said observes, one of Auerbach's most important contributions to modern scholarship. But what Auerbach's humanistic insight apparently does not allow him to see in this Providentially determined exegetical method is the highly restrictive economy, indeed, the polyvalent will to power over difference, of its prophecy-fulfillment structure, namely its teleo-logic: the often monomaniacal or ludicrously single-minded will of its practitioners, parodied playfully by Cervantes and mercilessly by Voltaire, to reduce the singularity of the events of the Old Testament to utter conformity with the events, present and futural, of the New Testament, and beyond that, the events of the historical world, not least in its imperial Roman dispensation, into the prophetic totality envisioned by Christianity. And, it should be remembered, figural interpretation was not simply a matter of ontological and cultural representation; it was also one of morality and socio-politics, that is, a hegemonic truth discourse-a "textual attitude" in Said's phrase-that saturated the European body politic. In the Medieval era, figural interpretation was complicitous with the crusades against Islam and with the depredations of the Holy Roman Empire, to name the most obvious instances. With the Reformation and the rise of Protestantism, especially the American Calvinist variety, this same figural exegesis, now appropriated to the colonization of the "New World," was complicitous, first, with the New England Israelites' divinely ordaIned "errand in the wilderness" (prefigured, in precisely the Auerbachian sense, by the Israelites of the Old Testament), which justified

Mufti's clarification of Said's secularism is acute-and much welcomed-in its acknowledgement, indeed, affirmation of the indissoluble relationship between modem Western metaphysics, nationalist culture, and imperial politics (a "naturalized supernaturalism,,6) I do not cite this passage to fault it. I cite it, rather, to point to Mufti's visible anxiety over the very real possibility, enabled by the uncertainty of its meaning-an uncertainty exacerbated, rather than minimized by its use in Humanism and Democratic Criticism-that Said's privileged references to "secularism" or "worldliness" will be interpreted by the "classical humanists" he is criticizing as an accommodational metaphysical perspective on the differential phenomena of being that in the end vindicates their universalism, identitarianism, and Eurocentricism, which, is also to say, will remain vulnerable to the kind of post-structuralist critique of humanism I have invoked above. To return to Auerbach, I believe it is imperative to emphasize upon his failure to radicalize his ex.ile from "Europe"-to acknowledge the decentering he suffered under the Nazi regime, not simply as an unhoming from his German homeland but also from the at-homeness of a humanist tradition whose securalism or worldliness was subsumed by a synthesizing principle of Presence (or Identity). His humanism was extraordinarily productive of new knowledge, as Said everywhere shows, not least in the chapter on Auerbach in Humanism and Democratic Criticism. But, in the end, by which I mean, at the base, there was always the anthropo-logos that accommodated this superstructural new-otherwise singularknowledge to itself and, as Said himself admits in passing (Humanism 956),7 to the Europe, indeed, as Vassilis Lambropoulos has powerfully ar~ued, to the Judeo-Christian (as opposed to Greek) Europe that imagined it. No matter the gradual shifting of emphasis from the center to the

35

36

William V. Spanos

the extermination of the "lowly" ("savage," "diabolic," "bestial") Native Americans,9 and then, following the rise of American democracy, with the "assimilation" of the "lowly" immigrants to the dominant A,ngloProtestant core culture. 10 Nor, closer to Said's worldly project, should it be overlooked that, from the beginning of their efforts, the European Zionists 'justified" their right to return to Palestine, their representation of the Palestinian Arabs as non-beings and their land as empty (terra nullius), their "settlements" and "improvements," and their systematic expulsion and/or containment of its "nomadic" inhabitants by appealing, nol-simply to the value system informing European Imperialism, which Said emphasizes, but also to the American allotrope of European Christian figural history. I am referring to the Puritan "errand in the wilderness," which in its secularized form, came to be embodied in the American "pioneer" spirit under the aegis of "Manifest Destiny." Indeed, Said insistently, if always indirectly, alludes to this appeal when he identifies the Zionists' effort to "mitigate the presence of large numbers of natives on a desired land" by convincing themselves and the West "that these natives did not exist," that is, was, "like the view of America as an empty land held 'by the Puritans" (Palestine 19), a "terra nullius," with the American pioneering spirit: I am not speaking here about mere propaganda, Which, were it to have depended principally upon lies about Palestine, would never have brought Zionism to its realization in Israel. What concerns me a great deal more is the strenglh of the process of diffusion whose main focus was the Zionist colonization of Palestine, its successes, its feats, its remarkable institutions; just as today the strength of Israeli information is its admiring self-regard and the celebration of its "pioneering" spirit, which Americans in particular have found it very easy to identify with. An intrinsic aspect of diffusive stren~th has been a systematic repression of the Arab reality in Palestine. (2 J) I Despite his lengthy treatment of Auerbach's analysis ofthejigura and the history of it influence on the representation of reality, Said, too, has nothing to say about this dark sociopolitical side of figural interpretation as he praises Auerbach for perceiving within this Judeo-Christian interpretation the "human will," not God, as the maker of "the whole of human history": One last and quite difficult aspect of figura needs pointing out here. Auerbach contends that the very concept of figura also functions as a middle term between the literal-historical dimension and, for the Christian author, the world of truth, verilas. So rather than conveying only an inert

Edward Said's Humanism and American Exceptionalism after 9/1 I

37

meaning for an episode or character in the past, in its second and more interesting sense figura is the intellectual and spiritual energy that does the actual connecting between past and present, history and Christian truth ...Thus for all the complexity of his argument and the minuteness of the often arcane evidence he presents, Auerbach, I believe is bringing us back to what is an essential Christian doctrine for believers but also a crucial element of human intellectual power and will. In this he follows Vico, who looks at the whole of human history and says, "mind made all this," an affirmation that audaciously reaffirms, but also to some degree undercuts, the religious dimension that gives credit to the divine. (Humanism 103) Earlier in Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Said underscores the "destructive" consequences of leaping hastily from the singular "to mobilized collective selves"; these leaps "lead to what Lukacs used to call lotalilies, unknowable existentially [because transcendental] but powerfully mobilizing" (80; my emphasis). Like all metaphysical systems-whether theological (like that of figural interpretation), or secular (like that of anthropology, to which Lukacs refers), they possess great force exactly because they are corporate and can stand in unjustifiably for action that is supposed to be careful, measured, and humane. '''Our view,' said Mrs. Albright, 'is that these sanctions are worth it,' 'it' being the killing and destruction of numberless civilians genocidally dispatched by a phrase" (80-1). Given Said's life-long effort on behalf of the Palestinian cause against the systemic force of Zionism, it is surprising that he does not perceive the analogy between this historical instance of inhumane repression "justified" by the "reality" produced by the Zionist "totality" and that inhumane repressiveness that characterized the history of Medieval and Reformationist Europe and America. According to Said, Auerbach and Vico "audaciously reaffirm" the human mind over God's, as the maker of history. But what, one is compelled to ask, when his exposition of Auerbach's insights is reconstellated into the historical world figural interpretation authorized, is the difference between man's mind and God's, if the history he willfully projects in the name of his "truth" is a figural (or, in Derrida's terms, "preformational" (21)) history, a "naturalized supernatural history," to use Said's own pejorative phrase, that ruthlessly dedifferentiates singularity, or differentiates only to more efficiently dedifferentiate and discipline smgularity? . Nor does Said have anything to say about the dark side of figural mterpretation's precipitation of the lowly into history. His summary of Auerbach's account is in fact an unequivocal encomium not simply to the brIlliance of his philological reading of the Judeo-Christian exegetical

38

39

William V. Spanos

Edward Said's Humanism and American Exceptionalism after 9/11

tradition, but to that aspect of Judeo-Christian history that, in breaking the hegemony of the classical separation of styles in favor of the low style prepared the way for the rise of realism, secularism, humanism, and, presumably, democracy:

least that is how I read the last sentences of Auerbach's "Epilogue" to Mimesis, after revealing that he had written it in exile in Istanbul during the war: "I hope that my study will reach its readers-both my friends of former years, if they are still alive, as well as all the others for whom it was intended. And may it contribute to bringing together again those whose love for our western history has serenely persevered" (Auerbach 557). Like the Virgil and the Dante he loved-and the diasporic Israelites of the Old Testament-he felt as if he were, if he did not see himself as, a member of a "saving remnant," which would bear the relic of the shattered "City" of the incarnate Logos across the seas of historical crisis to replant it in a "new time and world.',13

Christianity shatters the classical balance between high and low styles, just as Jesus' life destroys the separation between the sublime and, the everyday. What is set in motion as a result is the search for a new literary pact between writer and reader, a new synthesis or mingling between style and interpretation that will be adequate to the disturbing volatiliiY of worldly events in the much grander setting opened up by Christ's historical presence. To this end, SI. Augustine's enormous accomplishment, linked as he was to the classical world by his education, was to be the first to realize that classical antiquity had been superseded by a different world requiring a new sermo humilis, "a low style such as would properly only be applicable to comedy, but which now reaches out far beyond its original domain, and encroaches upon the deepest and highest, the sublime and the eternal." The problem then becomes how to relate the discursive, sequential events of human history to each other within the new figural dispensation that has triumphed conclusively over its predecessor, and then to find a language adequate to such a task, once, after the fall of the Roman Empire, Latin was no longer the lingua franca of Europe. (Humanism 106-

07)

It is no small irony that Said, who, more than anyone else, taught us to perceive the violence towards the other latent in "the textual attitude"-the preference for "the schematic authority of a text to the disorientations of direct encounters with the human" (Orientalism 93)-should, in the process of admiring its imaginative human possibilities, overlook the carnage justified by the "story" of the creation and "end" of the world fabricated by the Christian biblical exegetes and eventually inscribed in the mind of Europe. Auerbach's philological humanist scholarship indeed manifests a far greater tolerance of otherness, than the mandarin or nationalist "classical humanists" and the policy experts they have spawned. Despite this-and Said's concluding assertion that the author of Mimesis "offers no system" (Humanism 117)-Auerbach's humanism, if only vestigially, is motivated by the same yearning for "synthesis"-and the restricted economy (of 12 closure) that Said is criticizing. However foreign the world became for Auerbach in his cruel exile, I do not think he finally achieved the strength to "extinguish his love to all places," not least the Western humanist homeland, to enable him, in Said's words, to "grasp human experience and its written records in all their diversity and particularity" (Culture 335). At

III In some fundamental way, the lectures constituting Said's Humanism and Democratic Criticism were intended to provide directives enabling us to understand and deal with the events of 9/11, which he felt were epochal in their radical defamiliarization of the world previously organized by the West. More specifically, his retrieval and re-evaluation of humanism was meant to provide directives for resisting the Bush Administration's arrogant and extremist response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon-imposing "democracy" in the Middle East by forcethat threatens to render the "clash of civilizations" thesis of Orientalists like Bernard Lewis and policy experts like Samuel Huntington a selffulfilling prophecy: "I think that the moment has come, for me at least, to reconsider, re-examine, and reformulate the relevance of humanism as we head into a new millennium with so many circumstances undergoing enough dramatic change to transform the setting entirely" (Humanism 56). We might say, given the sense of fmality informing this statement of intent, that, for Said, the events of 9/11 and the Bush Administration's response constitute the culmination of an imperial global history presided over by the West that has, in Althusser's resonant Marxist terms, inadvertently but necessarily produced a radical "change of terrain," specifically the precipitation into corporeal presence of the hitherto geographically and psychologically remote specter-the West's (colonized) other-that, according to Said, has come increasingly to haunt the Western metropolis. 14 The significance of this epochal estrangement of the global terrain is, needless to say, too complex for easy determination, but Said's diagnosis of the devastating legacy of imperialism at the end of Culture and Imperialism provides us with a suggestive context:

40

William V. Spanos

[S]urely it is one of the unhappiest characteristics of the age to have produced more refugees, migrants, displaced persons, and exiles than' ever before in history, most of them as an accompaniment to and, ironically enough, as afterthoughts of the great post-colonial and imperial conflicts. As the struggle for independence produced new states and new boundaries, it also produced homeless wanderers, nomads, and vagrants, unassimilated to the emerging structures of institutional power, rejected by 'the established order for their intransigence and obdurate rebelliousness. And insofar as these people exist between the old and the new, between the-.old empire and the new state, their condition articulates the tensions,

irresolutions, and contradictions in the overlapping territories shown on the cultural map of imperialism. (332, emphasis added) As I read this culminating moment of a book that traces the itinerary of the West's colonized "others" in terms of an increasing psychological and then corporeal impingement on the metropolitan consciousness as well as on metropolitan space, Said is positing a history of Western imperialism in which its binarist logic, in the very process of fulfilling its possibilities, self-de-structs. Not unlike the "end of philosophy" and its precipitation of the nothing (das Nichts) that Heidegger announced with the coming into being of the technological "age of the world picture," this end of imperialism not only discloses the illegitimacy of the West's traditional representation of what it means to be human, but also precipitates into corporeal proximity the spectral "non-beings" that have always haunted this Western "humanist" logic. What this "coming to its end of imperialism" means first of all, as Said's reiteration of the in-between status of this vast population of migrants makes clear, is that the late post-imperial occasion is an interregnum, a time in which the "old world"-in all its modes ofthought andpractice-is dying while a "new [postnationalistJimperialist] world" is struggling to be born. But more important, it means that, in the wake of the self-destruction of Western imperialism and its binary logic, a multitude of human beings to whom the West had hitherto denied the status of humanity (and history)-"the multitude" in Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's version-are symptomatically demanding, not to be accommodated to the "Manhood" they had been denied by the imperial West, but, as Frantz Fanon put it long ago, a "new humanism," a new understanding of what it means to be human that is not tethered to an anthropological and Eurocentric principle of presence. Or, to re-invoke Said's identification of philology with humanism and the humanist intellectual as one who exists both inside and outside the text and the world, an all inclusive humanism that is always already in between, exilic,

Edward Said's Humanism and American Exceptionalism after 9/11

41

questioning, and careful. Following the passage from Culture and Imperialism quoted above Said adds: There is a great difference, however, between the optimistic mobility, the intellectual liveliness, and "the logic of daring" described by the various theoreticians [most notably the poststructuralists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Gliattari] on whose work I have drawn, and the massive dislocations, waste, misery, and horrors endured in our century's migrations and mutilated lives. Yet it is no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the sellled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages. From this perspective then all things are indeed counter, original, spare, strange. From this perspective also, one can see "the complete consort dancing together" contrapuntally [this is an astonishing revision of the global vision ofT.S. Eliot, Four Quartets]. And while it would be the rankest Panglossian dishonesty to say that the bravura performances of the intellectual exile and the miseries of the displaced person or refugee are the same, it is possible, I think, to regard the intellectual as first distilling then articulating the predicaments that disfigure modernity-mass deportation, imprisonment, population transfer, collective dispossession, and forced immigrations. (332-33, emphasis added) Said, of course, is here addressing the peculiar question of liberation precipitated by the implosion of the imperial and the epochal shift of "liberation as an intellectual mission" from "the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to the unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies whose incarnation today is the migrant." But clearly, if we reconstellate this passage into the context of his last book, it not only anticipates his definition of philology, humanism, and the humanities in the latter. In emphasizing the exilic intellectual's status as the "political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages" it also tells us more clearly than Humanism and Democratic Criticism does about the human, humanism, and the humanities. For it is clear here, in a way that it is not in the latter, that this being "in-between" ts one that takes place not only at sites of culture and socio-politics, but extends from the ontological and epistemological sites-thinking as such-through the site of language, to those other more worldly sites that Satd, no doubt rightly, overdetermines. That is to say, far from rejecting the essence of poststructuralist theory, this Saidian being "in between"

-42

William V. Spanos

tacitly incorporates it-and extends it beyond the disciplinary sites to which its practitioners tended to restrict it. In defining humanism in Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Said muffles this insight into the (always uneven) continuum of being, not least, the role that ontological interpretation, that is, metaphysical inquiry/thinking, has always but increasingly played in the Western imperial project, which is accountable for the production of "the predicaments that disfigure modernity-mass deportation, imprisonment, population transfer, collective dispossession, and forced migrations." Said's oversight renders his last book, however suggestive, finally inadequate to the imperatives for thought and action precipitated by the "change of terrain" incumbent on the event of 9/11 and the Bush Administration's announcement of America's "war on terror"-and its tacit invocation of a "state of emergency" that threatens to unleash global chaos and to destroy what little democracy exists in the United States, for it is not only safeguarding American economic interests, nor securing America's political authority that motivates these drastic measures. However important these are, they are themselves informed by "the American' way of life" that began to take shape with the Puritans' providentially ordained "errand in the wilderness," that is, the ontologically grounded exceptionalism that not only privileged a "New" America over the "Old World," but also justified, indeed, demanded, an imperial "frontier"-a threatening wilderness (or enemy)-the "struggle" against which would always rejuvenate America, that is, prevent it from decay or reversion, as in the case of the "Old World," to one form of barbarism or other. In the wake of the demise of Puritan theocracy and the "humanist" American Revolution, this divinely ordained "missionary" errand became the "secular" doctrine of "Manifest Destiny," which resulted in Indian removal, the imperial Mexican War, the Indian Wars that eventuated in the virtual genocide of the native Americans, and, at the end of the century, when the continental frontier had been closed, in the Spanish American War under President McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. As the documented history of twentieth century America amply testifies (not least in the wake of World War II and the emergence of the Cold War), this deeply inscribed ontological-cultural-political paradigmthe geographical frontier had by this time became a metaphor (the "wilderness" of the world)-continued to inform American global policy. But during the Vietnam War, specifically when it became dramatically clear that America was destroying the land, the culture, and the people of an East Asian country struggling to free itself from colonial rule, in order

Edward Said's Humanism and American Exceptionalism after 9/11

43

to "save Vietnam for the free [humanist] world," this deep ontologicallygrounded structure of the American character (or rather of the dominant Anglo-Protestant core culture) and its predatory violence emerged to visibility, and the Anglo-Protestant exceptionalist American national identity began to unravel. This was the symptomatic witness of the polyvalent protest movement in the United States. But it was, significantly, also the more theoretical witness of an emergent "antihumanist" poststructuralism. To counter this unraveling, the dominant culture in America-the political elite, the corporate world, the media and its intellectual deputies (William Bennett, Lynn Cheney, Allen Bloom, Hilton Kramer among many other traditional "humanists") mounted a massive campaign in the name of the humanist ethos ("the best that has been thought and said about the world," in Matthew Amold's terms, to "forget Vietnam" or, as the first Bush put the healthy debate over the American national identity, to "kick the Vietnam syndrome." Beginning in the wake of the humiliating defeat of American in Southeast Asia and extending through the implosion of the Soviet Union, this amnesiac initiative, this frantic will of the dominant culture to recuperate the ontological origins of the American exceptionalist identity, was brought to fruition by the "surgical defeat" of Saddam Hussein's army in the first Gulf War, an achievement to which the imperial "Project for the New American Century (PNAC)"-its envisioning of a global Pax Americana-bears symbolically witness. II The polyvalently symbolic attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon perpetrated by Al Qaeda sealed the Pandora's Box opened by the protest movement against the Vietnam War and the advent of poststructuralism in the United States. Subsequently, I submit, the George Bush, Jr. Adrninistration-a combination of Neo-Conservative "humanists" and Anglo-Protestantsannounced its global "war on terror" and, tacitly, a state of emergency, invaded Afghanistan, dissimulated about Saddam Hussein weapons of mass destruction, invaded Iraq, and commenced the process of imposing capitalist democracies on Islamic countries as much in the name of this deeply back-grounded-hegemonic-{)ntological American exceptionalist ethos as in the name of the more overtly worldly-and visible-interests that demarcate the practices and institutions of humanism today. These, admittedly, are large generalizations that cannot be do~umented within the limits of this essay.16 But perhaps a brief but POlDted reference to the exemplary global projections in the wake of 9/11/01 of one of the most visible humanist intellectual deputies of the d?m!~ant culture in America might go some way in suggesting their VIabIlIty. I am referring to Samuel P. Huntington, the influential policy

44

William V. Spanos

expert and the author of The Clash of Civilizations (whose thesis Said shredded on several occasions l7 and his recent diagnosis of the post- 9/11 in Who Are We? Challenges to America's National Identity (2004),.a book that, as the telling title implies, manifests the nationalist anxiety incumbent on the emergence of internal symptoms that threaten to disintegrate the civilizational unity of America and points directly to the foundational history of this unity that will justify his projection of America's- global future. Indeed, what is especially noteworthy about the discourse of this book is that its very structure is modeled on the "American jeremiad," the ritualized crisis discourse inaugurated by the Puritans at the outset of American history to always recuperate a disintegrating unity and to always rejuvenate its divinely ordained exceptionalist errand, that, as Sacvan Bercovitch has brilliantly shown, became fundamental to the hegemonic discourse of a "secularized" America. 18 Though Huntington's book was instigated by the events of 9/11, not least by the nationalist fervor they mobilized, its real point of departure, as the inordinate amount of space he devotes to it testifies, lies in his acute anxiety (and that of his class-the duplicitous "we" in the title) over what he calls in'his first chapter "The Crisis of National Identity." This was the crisis of identity that, according to Huntington, was precipitated by the momentum of dissent inaugurated in the decade of the Vietnam War, which he tellingly refers to as "Deconstructing America: The Rise of Subnational Identities" in a rhetoric that suggests the complicity of an emergent (foreign) deconstructionist theory (and, apparently, practice) with alien internal cultural forces that were de-nationalizing America: The deconstructionists promote programs to enhance the status and influence of subnational racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. They encouraged immigrants to maintain their birth country cultures, granted them legal privileges denied to native-born Americans, and denounced the idea of Americanization as un-American. They pushed the rewriting of history syllabi and textbooks so as to refer to the "peoples" of the United States in place of the single people of the Constitution. They urged supplementing or substituting for national history the history of subnational groups. They downgraded the centrality of English in American life and pushed bilingual education and linguistic diversity. They advocated legal recognition of group rights and racial preferences over the individual rights central to the American Creed. They justified their actions by theories of multiculturalism and the idea that diversity rather than unity or community should be America's overriding value. The combined effect of these efforts was to promote the deconstruction of the American national identity that had been gradually created over three centuries and the ascendance of subnational identities. (Huntington 142)

Edward Said's Humanism and American Exceptionalism after 9111

45

Having "established" the source of anxiety, Huntington goes on, according to the structural imperatives of the American jeremiad, first, to recall the glorious historical origins of the American national identity in the Puritan's divinely ordained exceptionalist "errand in the wilderness," a recollection, not incidentally, he articulates in a rhetoric that affiliates the imperialism of the Word of God (the theo-Iogos) with that of colonialism (the settlements that justified the expropriation of the "nomadic" native Americans' land): The settling of America was, of course, a result of economic and other motives, as well as religious ones. Quakers and Methodist settled in Pennsylvania. Catholics established a beachhead in Maryland. Religious intensity was undoubtedly greatest among the Puritans, especially in Massachusetts. They took the lead in defining their settlement based on "a Covenant with God" to create "a city on the hill" as a model for all the world, and people of the other Protestant faiths soon also came to see themselves and America in a similar way. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Americans defined their mission in the new World in biblical terms. They were a "chosen people," on an "errand in the wilderness, creating "the new Israel" or the "new Jerusalem" in what was clearly "the promised land." American was the site of a "new Heaven and a new earth, the home of justice," God's country. The settlement of American was vested, as Sacvan Bercovitch puts it, "with all the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual appeal of a religious quest." This sense of holy mission was easily expanded into millenarian themes of America as "the redeemer nation" and "the visionary republic." (142)19 Then, in order to underscore the founding and enabling character of this origin, Huntington reminds his readers of the several "Great Awakenings," analogous to and deriving from the Puritans' jeremiads, that have periodically irrupted in American history to mobilize, reunify, and regenerate the American national identity in times of crisis. Countering the thesis, insistently affirmed by Said, that America is an immigrant and therefore a radically multicultural society, Huntington locates the origins of the American national identity, not in the founding of the American Creed (the juridical and governmental tenets of constitutional democracy) nor in the immigrations it enables, but in the settler Puritans' commitment to the "Covenant with God" and their "errand in the wilderness." Following the inexorable imperatives of this origin, he thus identifies the "Anglo-Protestant culture" this commitment established as the "core culture" of America. It is this "Anglo-Protestant Core culture," according to Huntington, that constitutes the essence of the

46

William V. Spanos

Edward Said's Humanism and American Exceptionalism after 9/11

American national identity and that has been put into CTISIS by the "deconstruction of America" and the emergence of what he vulgarly calls "subnational cultures" to prominence since the I960s. And it is thi~ AngloProtestant core culture, this "civilizational" national identity-and its ontologically ordained exceptionalist global mission-that his jeremiad, "Who Are We?" would recuperate. As this post-9/11 American "humanist"-there is no indication that he is a practicing Protestantsummarily puts this reactionary jeremiadic project of recuperation and _ rejuvenation (by violence) in his preface,

of his jeremiadic narrative of America's role in the world. "At the end of the twentieth century," he writes, in a section tellingly entitled "The Search for an Enemy," "Democracy was left without a significant secular ideological rival, and the United States was left without a peer competitor. Among American foreign policy elites, the results were euphoria, pride, arrogance-and uncertainty. The absence of an ideological threat [his policy-making tenn for the traditional frontier is "fault line"] produced an absence of purpose.. .. The ideal enemy for America would be ideologically hostile, racially and culturally different, and militarily strong enough to pose a credible threat to America. The foreign policy debates of the 1990s were largely over who might be such an enemy" (262). And after rehearsing all the possibilities imagined by these anxious policy experts, he concludes in a language all too reminiscent of the terrible banality of the policy experts who conducted the war in Vietnam from the Pentagon: "And on September II, 2001, Osama bin Laden ended America's search. The attacks on New York and Washington followed by the wars with Afghanistan and Iraq and the more 'diffuse war on terror' makes militant Islam America's first enemy of the twenty-first century" (Huntington 263). With these attacks on American soil by "militant Islam," Huntington's earlier annunciation of "the clash of civilizations"-his grotesque reduction of the great variety of cultures within the West and the East to a Manichean model-is brought to what can only be called its paranoid fulfillment. "American identity," he writes, "began a new phase with the new century. Its salience and substance in this phase are being shaped by America's new vulnerability to external attack and by a new tum to religion, a Great Awakening in America" (336). In keeping with the inexorably reductive structural logic of the American jeremiad, in other words, Huntington invokes the "civilizational" threat "militant Islam" poses to America not simply to mobilize the disparate constituencies of the American nation, but to recuperate and rejuvenate the "Anglo-Protestant core culture," which, he affinns, against the claims of the "American Creed," has been the defming characteristic of the American national identity, the etymon of America's greatness, and the abiding justification of its "benign" errand in the wilderness. As in the case of the American jeremiad, but now on a global scale, perpetual war-in the name not Simply of "homeland security" and the Pax Americana, but, as his insistent emphasis on the ontological register makes manifest, the American understanding of what it means to be truly human-must, he implies, necessarily be America's and the world's future. And this deeply backgrounded, polyvalent American exceptionalism, at the deepest level

All societies face recurring threats to their existence, to which they evenrually succumb. Yet some societies, even when so threatened, are also capable of postponing their demise by halting and reversing the processes of decline and renewing their vitality. J believe that America can do that and that Americans should recommit themselves to the AnglO-Protestant culrure, traditions, and values that for three centuries and a half have been embraced by Americans of all races, ethnicities, and religions and that have been the source of their liberty, unity, power, prosperity, and moral leadership as a force for good in the world. (xvii) To return, after this detour to the events of9/11 that have "changed the terrain" of our knowledge about the world at large and that instigated Huntington's jeremiad, we are now enabled to understand the role AI Qaeda plays in the global scenario he projects in Who Are We?-and, by extension, the role the American exceptionalist discourse he is recuperating, if not his particular appropriation of it, is playing in the Bush Administration's foreign policy in the Middle East in particular and in the global arena in general. The difficult experience of the wilderness in the discourse of the American jeremiad functioned as a necessary evil that both threatened the well-being of the "civilized" community-produced anxiety-and, by way of this anxiety-producing threat, renewed its members' commitment to the "Covenant" and their communal energy. (This is also the function of the "secular" frontier-myth of the development of the American national identity. 20) Similarly, we can say that, in the wake of the demise of the Cold War, by which time, as I have observed, the concept of the frontier had metamorphosed into a general metaphor, the anxiety instigated by the loss of a frontier/enemy, which was always a necessary ingredient of the myth of American exceptionalism and it power to sustain the unity of the American identity, was relieved by al Qaeda's attacks on American soil and the focalization of an emergent "militant Islam" as "America's" new global adversary. This paradoxical relief, in fact, is articulated by Huntington at the climax

47

49

William V. Spanos

Edward Said's Humanism and American Exceptionalism after 9/11

of which is a "civil religion" or "secular theology" that determines the meaning of the human, is, mutatis mutandis, the vision that has justified the Bush Administration's thinking and practice in its relationship to a global "militant" or "extremist" Islam. The perception of the global future as a "clash of civilizations," enabled by the events of 9/1 I, could become a world-devastating selffulfilling prophecy, and its corollary, "homeland security," a pertnanent state of exception that, in the name of saving it, would destroy democracy in America. It is this paranoid vision that has radically estranged the terrain of the knowledge about the world, or, to put it in the American context Said emphasizes, that has dislocated the traditional humanist perspective on the world humanity inhabits and rendered him/her an exile-a "political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages" (Culture 332) And, if this is the case, if this paranoid American vision is, as I have been suggesting under the influence of Said's practice, informed not simply by an economic or a political or cultural economy, but also by an ontological and epistemological economy-an economy that determines the meaning of what a human being is and how he/she ought to comports his/herself towards being at large, then a humanism that does not examine its genealogy in the way the early poststructuralists-Heidegger, Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault-did, will not be adequate, despite its advances over the latter, either to the task ofresisting the American juggernaut's momentum towards cataclysm, or of envisioning a global configuration of humanity in which one can see, as Said so beautifully puts it, '''the complete consort dancing together, contrapuntally'" (332). This, to repeat, is by no means to privilege the early poststructuralists over Said. That would indeed, be a retrogressive initiative. It is to say, rather, that, to me, Humanism and Democratic Criticism. however suggestive its directives concerning opposition in America, cannot have the status, given to it by so many of his friends and disciples since its posthumous publication, of a final statement, a summum, an apologia pro vita sua. Despite its decisive criticism of the inhumanity of various "traditional" or "classical" humanistic practices, it does not challenge, if it does not leave intact, that ontologically enabled meaning of humanism that, in claiming its liberation from the arbitrary authority of theological principle of presence, the Word of God, enabled a "liberal humanist" perspective that accommodated the other-difference, individuality, agency-to its invisible anthropo-logos, "enabled" them to take their proper place within the circle of which the Word of (Western, now American) Man is the Center. For, to invoke the passage from Grarnsci on the imperatives of "knowing oneself," quoted as

one of the epigraphs inaugurating this essay, that Said has virtually given us to think, this deeply inscribed dehumanizing ontological understanding of the human is also a trace-indeed, one of the most fatally determinative-of the "infinity of traces" deposited in us by "the historical process to date" "without leaving an inventory." The accommodational tolerance of the humanism Said may reject but, in inventorying the traces that have disfigured modernity, finally leaves intact in Humanism and Democratic Criticism is certainly not '''the complete consort dancing together,' contrapuntally" (Culture 332). For that vision of global humanity, we need, as I have suggested, following Said's practice, a definition of the human that demotes Man from the status of sovereign Subject, the lord and master "over all he surveys" to render humanity (the anthropos logon echon) -the being burdened by the capability of speech-the responsible caretakers of being in all its infinite variety and mystery.

48

Notes I A symptom of this is the collection of essays published almost immediately after his death under the editorship of Homi Bhabha and W.J.T. Mitchell, Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation. Lines from T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets. 2 I should point out in the beginning that I use the word "poststructuralist" not only to refer to the technical meaning given to it by professors, but also to the meaning that implicitly resonates in its etymology. Insofar as metaphysical thinking in all its varieties perceives the dynamic phenomena of being from after or above them (meta-ta-physica or panoptically), it spatializes or, more precisely, structuralizes that which in essence-time, historicity, the nothing, alterity----<:annot be finally structured. Insofar as post-structural thinking exists to delegitimize the hegemony of metaphysical (or logocentric) thinking, it is post-structuralist. Its essential function is to de-structure or de-construct the structure willfully imposed on time, historicity, the nothing, alterity by the imperial metaphysical mind, not for the purpose of annihilating it, but of re-Ieasing or liberating that which it has colonized: enclosed and contained in a structure. 3 For reasons that will become clear, I understand the urgency of this diagnosis of the post-9f11 occasion, which he reiterates in the book, in the light of Louis Althusser's post-humanist analysis of the epochal "change of terrain" in the "domain" of knowledge production precipitated by Marx's perception of the radically indissoluble relationality of vision privileged by the (capitalist) West and cultural production and politics. See Althusser, "From Capital to Marx's Philosophy," in Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital; see also Spanos,

50

Edward Said's Humanism and American Exceptionalisrn after 9/11

51

William V. Spanos

"Althusser's Problematic in the Context of the Vietnam War: Towards a Spectral Politics." . 4 "There is one provision in Vico's theory that I'd like particularly to emphasize. Early in New Science, he lists an exhaustive set of 'elements,' or principles, out of which he says his method will be derived as the book progresses. Moreover, he adds, 'and just as the blood does animate inanimate bodies, so will these elements course through our Science and animate it in all its reasonings about the common nature of nations' (Vico, 60). A moment later, he seems to undermine the whole prospect of knowledge by observing as a cardinal principle that 'because orthe indefinite nature of the human mind wherever it is lost in ignorance man makes himself the measure of things,' Now there is no doubt that Vico also believes that humanistic knowledge does exist and that it arises from primitive, or what he calls poetic, thought and over time develops into philosophical knowledge. Despite the progress, despite the certainty and truth of later knowledge, Vico, I believe, takes the tragic view that human knowledge is permanently undermined by the 'indefinite nature of the human mind,' ... One can acquire philosophy and knowledge, it is true, but the basically unsatisfactory fallibility (rather than its constant improvement) of the human mind persists nonetheless. So there is always something radically incomplete, insufficient, provisional, disputable, and arguable about humanistic knowledge that Vico never loses sight of and that, as I said, gives the whole idea of humanism a tragic flaw that is constitutive to it and cannot be removed. This flaw can be remedied and mitigated by the disciplines of philological learning and philosophic understanding ... but it can never be superceded" (Said, Humanism 11-12). S For a fuller account of this history, see Spanos, The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism. See also Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish; E.A. Gutkind, Urban Development in Western Europe: France and Belgium; and Norman J. Johnston, Cities in the Round. 6 The phrase derives from Meyer H. Abram, one of the most influential humanists of pre-poststructuralist period. See Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literatures. 7 See also Paul A. Bove, ''The Last of the Latecomers (Part I): The Critical Syntheses of Erich Auerbach," 8 See Vassilis Lambropoulos, The Rise of Eurocentrism: Anatomy of Interpretation, especially pages 3-24 & 85-91. 9 See Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975 and The American Jeremiad. See Spanos, "American Exceptionalism, the Jeremiad, and the Frontier, Before and After 9/11/01: From the Puritan to the New-Con Man," an unpublished essay. 10 It is precisely this elitist and repressive exegetical tradition to which the neoconservative humanist Samuel P. Huntington appeals in Who Are We?: Challenges to the American National Identity in the wake of 9/11/01 in calling for a "Great Awakening" in America that would recuperate the "Anglo-Protestant core culture" in the face of the rise of "subnational cultures" that threaten to "deconstruct" the

American national identity and thus put America at risk in the civilizational clash with "militant Islam." 11 This European distinction between nomadic and sedentary peoples that justified the cxpropriation of land from the indigenous people of the "New World" became international law during the period of exploration and colonization. As Francis Jennings (in The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonization and the Cant of Conquest) and Peter Hulme (in Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797) have shown, this process of legalizing expropriation was especially enhanced by the New England Puritans. Relying on figural exegesis, John Winthrop, for example, justified the Massachusetts Bay Colony's landgrabbing by appealing to "the legal argument of vacuum domicilium by which the Indians had 'natural' but not 'civil' rights over the land because they had not 'subdued' it" (Hulme I58). 12 See Paul Bove's Intellectuals in Power, where he reiteratively points to Auerbach's appeal to "synthesis" that remained tethered to the German "mandarin" humanist tradition he was opposing. 13 In this regard, see Harry Harootunian, "Conjunctural Traces: Said's 'Inventory'" in Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation: "In the case of Erich Auerbach, we have to wonder what exactly Said had in mind in embracing a scholarly figure who spent the wartime years in Turkey, once regarded the threshold of Asia and the classical boundary marking off the 'Orient' from Europe, obsessively fixed on writing an account of realist representation of the West that both reinforced the claims of cultural unity that Said's Orientalism sought to repudiate and quite purposefully seemed to have bracketed out the immediate environment in order to produce the text in question, Mimesis .... For Auerbach, Turkey simply constituted the refuge of exile and offered a culture to which he neither belonged nor in which he had any really abiding interest (unlike Said's relationship top the U.S.). In fact, its very absence in his text and the negativity he associated with it (poor libraries) underscore the importance of his cultural act to rethink the unity of Europe's cultural tradition and to authenticate a singular identity between its origins and its modern present" (69-70). 14 This disclosure of the self-de-destruction of the logic of imperialism-its eventual and inevitable precipitation of its spectral other in corporal form into the metropolis-is the supreme theme of Cul/ure and Imperialism both in its content and structure. See Spanos, "Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism: A Treatise on ?pectrality," forthcoming in Annals ofScholarship. I am referring to the neo-conservative think-tank, affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute, many of whose members now hold high positions in the George W. Bush Administration. Its policy document, "Rebuilding of America's Defenses," written before 9/11/01, became the model of the Bush presidency's global policies and practices, not least the invasion of Iraq, in the aftermath of II. See http://www.dkosopedia.comiindex.phplProjectJoUhe_New_Century For more particular historical evidence supporting these generalizations, see Spanos, "Vietnam and the Pax Americana: A Genealogy of the 'New World Order'" in America's Shadow: Anatomy of Empire; and "American

?f

52

William V. Spanos

Exceptionalism, the Jeremiad, and the Frontier: From The Puritan to the Neo-con" (Unpublished). . 17 Edward W. Said, "The Clash of Definitions," in Reflection on Exile and Other Essays. See also the DVD, Said, "The Myth of 'The Clash of Civilizations. '" 18 See Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad: "The American Puritan jeremiad was the ritual of a culture on an errand-which is to say, a culture b~ed on a faith in process. Substituting teleology for hierarchy, it discarded the Old World ideal of stasis for a New World vision of the future. Its function was to create a climate of anxiety that helped release the restless 'progressivist' energies required for the success of the venture... It made anxiety its end as well as its means. Crisis was the social norm it sought to inculcate. The very concept of errand, after all, implied a state of unfulfillment. The future, though divinely assured, was never quite there, and New England's Jeremiahs set out to provide the sense of insecurity that would ensure the outcome. Denouncing or affirming, their vision fed on the distance between promise and fact" (23). It was this divinely sanctioned teleological structure that, according to Bercovitch, instigated the American future. The Puritan's "rhetoric and vision facilitated the process of colonial growth. And in sustaining that rhetoric and vision, the latter-day Jeremiahs effectually forged a powerful vehicle of middle-class ideology: a ritual of progress through consensus, a system of sacred-secular symbols for a laissezfaire creed, a 'civil religion' for a people chosen to spring fully formed into the modem world-America, the first begotten daughter of democratic capitalism, the only country that developed, from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries into a wholly middle-class culture" (28-29). 19 Typical of his instrumentalist thinking-a calculative thinking enabled by beginning inquiry from the end he has in mind (by, that is, reducing temporal history to a picture or, in the language of the policy expert, scenario), Huntington invokes Bercovitch's history of the American jeremiad without informing his readers that Bercovitch's statement about the Puritan settlement of America is intended to disclose the origins of dark-violent-side of the American national identity. 20 See Frederick Jackson Turner, ''The Significance of the Frontier in American History," in The Frontier in American HistDlY: 37-38.

Works Cited Abram, Meyer H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973. Althusser, Louis & Etienne Balibar. Reading Capital. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Verso, 1970.

Edward Said's Humanism and American Exceptionalism after 9/11

53

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in the Western World. Trans. Willard Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Puritan Origins of the American Self New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975. _. The American Jeremiad. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. Bhabha, Homi & W.J.T. Mitchell. Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Bove, Paul. Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Derrida, Jacques. "Force and Signification." Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995. Gutkind, E.A. Urban Development in Western Europe: France and Belgium. NewYork: Free Press, 1970. Hugh of SI. Victor. Didascalicon. Trans. Jerome Taylor. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961. Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797. London: Methuen, 1986. Huntington, Samuel P. Who Are We? Challenges to the American National Identity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004. Jennings, Francis. The Invasion ofAmerica: Indians, Colonization and the Cant of Conquest. New York: W.W.Norton, 1976. Johnston, Norman J. Cities in the Round. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1983. Lambropoulos, Vassilis. The Rise of Eurocentrism: Anatomy of Interpretation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Mufti, Aamir R. "Critical Secularism: A Reintroduction for Perilous Times," Critical Secularism Ed. Aamir R. Mufti, a special issue of bozmdary 2, vol.31. 2 (2004): 1-9. Said, Edward W. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. -. Reflection on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. - . "The Myth of 'The Clash of Civilizations.''' Northampton, Mass: Media Education Foundation, 2002. -. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. -. The Question ofPalestine. New York: Times Books, 1979. -. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978.

54

William V. Spanos

Spanos, William V. America's Shadow: Anatomy ofEmpire. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. -. The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. - . "Althusser's Problematic in the Context of the Vietnam War: Towards a Spectral Politics," Rethinking Marxism, vol. 10 (1998): 1-21. - . "American Exceptionalism, the Jeremiad, and the Frontier: From The Puritan to the Neo-con." Unpublished essay. Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. New York: Dover Books, 1996. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

CHAPTER Two 'LIKE A SIBYLLINE CREATURE' : THE WOMAN MIGRANT AS HUMANIST SUBJECT IN JACOB LAWRENCE'S EARLY WORK JUTTA GSOELS-LoRENSEN

Ln December 1941, Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series, a narrative consisting of 60 panels and a script of accompanying 60 short "captions" representing the vast and rapid relocation of Mrican American, West Indian and African labor to the industrialized centers of the North and the West of the US in the wake of a virtually failed effort to "reconstruct" the American South after the Civil War, opened to much acclaim in Edith Halpert's prestigious Downtown Gallery in New York City (Wheat, Lawrence 23). This showing at a major commercial art gallery, together with the publication of 26 of its panels in Fortune magazine, is generally cast as Lawrence's breakthrough moment, affording him recognition by a larger, mainstream public and establishing him as a critically acclaimed painter in the institutions of the New York art world, which was off limits to all but a few African Americans at that time (Turner 97, Powell 147).1 In the wake of this exposure, however, the 60 panels of the Migration Series, divided into odd and even-numbered ones, were added to the permanent collections of two premier art institutions in the US: The Museum of Modern Art in New York City and what is now known as The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC? In sum, 1941 made Lawrence a highly visible figure: first of all as an artist, but also as an educator, a speaker, juror, and panel discussant with many obligations and responsibilities, all of wlJich he took on obligingly. His sudden visibility seems to have weighed heavily on him though, resulting in his voluntary hospitalization in Hillside Hospital in Queens, New York, where he was treated for depression only a few years later, in 1949 (Bearden and

56

Jutta Gsoels-Lorensen

Henderson 305-306).3 Despite this fact, which merits but brief mention in biographical accounts, although its symptomatology speaks volumes, his life, generally speaking, continues to be cast as a story of what conventional description calls "success," i.e. presence in major museums and collections; renown beyond his earlier acknowledgement in the Harlem community; national as well as international recognition; in short, everything that the telling slide from being a representative of "American Negro Art" (Halpert's description in 1941) to being viewed as an 4 "American" painter implied. Lawrence himself, ever a quiet, reserv.ed commentator, proved hesitant to offer much by way of explanation; yet, despite his reticence, there are a number of indications that he appears to have been much conflicted about the narrative his painter-life had become, especially about the different, yet highly charged, labels pinned on him. As is evident in the interviews he has given, he was struggling continuously with the grand illustrative summation of himself and his work that the art world expected of him. Importantly, therefore, the year 1941, the year of his "breakthrough," also marks the emergence of a set of questions, in themselves highly ideologically charged, that have long been structuring, whether implicitly or explicitly, criticism and scholarship on Lawrence: Why is it that Lawrence's work has been able to reach such a "wide audience"? (Wheat 23; Patton 156); and what is the place of a "black artist" in "America" in the twentieth century?5 Before these queries, Lawrence's work has undergone a strange analysis that has left many important aspects as if shielded from investigation or committed to invisibility due to the tacit assumptions operative in the questions as posed. Peter T. Nesbett and Michelle DuBois, in their introduction to the Catalogue Raisonne, published in the year 2000, discern a "web of contradictions and sets of dialectics" in Lawrence criticism, in light of which they propose a more inclusive mode of reflection that would "embrace" the dichotomous terms they have ascertained (13). This exhortation, albeit well-intentioned, is premature, if not misguided; in fact, it may serve to exemplify a tenet of Lawrence criticism that seems as unassailable as it is disconcerting-namely, the narrative of conciliation, optimism and hope "in the end" as regards race relations in the US that appears with unfailing regularity, repeatedly even, in essays that are positioned precisely against the force of its thrust. 6 The idiom of this harmonization rests on a powerful vocabulary presenting Lawrence's work as "universal" (Wheat 23-24; Karlstrom 242, to cite but a few), "epic" (Hills 141; Brown 11; Turner 13, among others), or as manifesting "American ideals about individual good fortune" (Patton 156); Lawrence himself is cast as a "humanist with a moral vision" (Wheat 24),

'Like a Sibylline Creature': The Woman Migrant as Humanist Subject

57

depicting the "human struggle" or the "universal human story" (Harvey 13,17; Karlstrom 236-7; 242; Hills 186). The rapidity with which Lawrence's engaging self-representation of African Americans becomes recoded into a national and ultimately universal story is more than troubling. Its vehicle is precisely the language of "man" as it resounds in the articulations just quoted, and which defines criticism on Lawrence's work quintessentially, serving, again and again, as the ultimate point of reference. Yet, in spite of its ubiquity, or precisely because of it, the idiom of "humanism" operates like a cipher: although it is employed, I surmise, to describe Lawrence's distance from Abstract Expressionism or as a response to the documentary photographical record of the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s-but notably these dialectical employments do not receive clear articulation; they rather remain implicit-it functions, in the end, as a conciliatory idiom that, again without much specification, appears under the sign of a peculiar common or "natural" intelligibility, as if thinking about Lawrence's work as "humanistic" or "humanitarian" in itself presented a theoretical vantage point beyond all others and thus shines the light of [mal insight on his variegated endeavors. To put it differently: the idiom of humanism, in the US American context from which all current Lawrence criticism hails, is endowed with the privilege of resting in the comfort of what is the accepted, self-evident norm, hence of having already been exempted from being contested because of its ratification by the hegemonic context of its utterance. Therefore, with the language of man, no mailer how involved the preceding argument, essays on Lawrence have the tendency to sound a low tone, to assume, as it were, a pose ofrest, while offering their strongest conviction. These terms, in the wake of well established theoretical inquiries that have removed the idiom of universality from the pinnacle of "all mankind" and placed it in its precise context of Eurocentric thought and imperialist politics, thus revealing its orchestration of power, betray a strikingly unaware language of criticism accommodating Lawrence's work to a sense of "humanism" still fully invested in the unassailable "unity of man": as if this sign, "had no origin, no historical, cultural, linguistic limit, not even a metaphysical limit," as Jacques Derrida reminds us in "The Ends of Man" (35), his reflection on Martin Heidegger's famous "Letter on Humanism." Admittedly, recent essays on Lawrence, especially the Collection that constitutes the multi-authored companion monograph to the catalogue raisonne, Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence (2000), do not take recourse to this idiom as readily; nonetheless, it remains operative and does so, in virtually all cases, axiomatically. One could interject that the language of "man" echoes Lawrence's own

58

Jutta Gsoels-Lorensen

attempts to explicate his work in terms of a universality of all humanity and an epic dimension of representation. Also, that he has repeatedly affirmed his being "very much interested in the humanistic," or in "the human subject" (Wheat 14), and that the impetus behind his painting lies in wanting to portray "the struggle of man to always better his condition and to move forward."? This is certainly the case, and scholars as well as critics have used this neat congruence of terminology to good effect llnd quote Lawrence's own words as the validating source for their assessment. And yet, his use of "man" or of "human"-notions so strongly connoted in the history of Western metaphysics, as well as so essentially imbued with a relentless history of erasing the other for the sake of homogeneity and identity, something ably represented in the introductory essay by the editors of this volume-I would contend, emerges from a radically different ground and therefore needs to be urgently reconsidered; for one because Lawrence's words begin to signifY otherwise when placed in relation to the language of his images. 8 The following reading of a small number of Lawrence's early works under the tutel.age of, to echo Lawrence's articulation, the "human subject" has been provoked by a concomitant consideration of Edward Said's Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), in which Said proposes a rethinking of the humanist endeavor in terms of a thoroughly democratic and critical "humanist practice" (my emphasis) rather than an anthropologically informed, static notion of "man" (6). This humanist practice is an active, interventionist engagement with what he has termed "worldly context," i.e. with "the real historical world from whose circumstances none of us can in fact ever be separated, not even in theory" (Said 48). It thus follows that Said will inveigh against any notion of humanism that has calcified into patrimonial "possession" (6) and that proceeds from a thought of "man" as aloof from the vicissitudes of history, politics and culture. Significantly, though, he argues for a critique of humanism "in the name of humanism" (10), while being fully aware thatwith the name of man, in whatever Latin-derived instantiation, so dispersed in all directions of the political and cultural spectrum-this can only ever be a vexed task indeed. The terminology of the human, like "humanitarian," "humane" or "humanistic," is omnipresent in contemporary discourses and can even serve, as Said reminds us, to justifY military interventions, as was the case with NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 (7). Yet, Said is not prepared to abandon the profoundly troubled terminology of man; instead he advocates a renewed humanism that operates as a critical, democratic practice of great urgency, a different task that needs to be more "cosmopolitan" and "text-and-

'Like a Sibylline Creature': The Woman Migrant as Humanist Subject

59

language bound"; moreover, a humanism fully cognizant of its frightful history, while simultaneously acutely attuned and receptive "to the emergent voices and currents of the present, many of them exilic, extraterritorial, and unhoused, as well as uniquely American" (11).9 In my view, any attempt at negotiating Lawrence's recourse to the name of man can benefit greatly from Said's procedure of careful, patient weighing, through counter-reading instead of wholesale abandonment, of this laden concept. Lawrence, like Said, is also engaged in re-envisioning a humanist practice-rather than working from a bedrock of human universalityprecisely in view of the incisive migratory movement whose implications he knew most intimately, namely that of the "Great Migration" of African Americans, West Indians and Africans to the urban centers in the north and west of the US in the early decades of the 20th century.JO Therefore, I propose that Lawrence's insistent recourse to the signifier "human" be investigated in a Saidian vein as an attempt, on the one hand, to interrogate the unthinking (yet nonetheless politically operative and historically particular) use of it, and on the other, to reinvest it with a meaning that is tethered to a vibrant critical, democratic practice. Tracing Lawrence's mobilization of the signifier "human" is no less treacherous because his language could be reappropriated to support a more rigid, unaware humanism, possibly even hooked to a nationalist agenda. Generally speaking, it seems as if Lawrence were much more conflicted about the "humanistic practice" with which he circumscribes his work than his interviewers and critics gleaned. One assessment of his work that would suggest a line of inquiry in precisely this manner is Romare Bearden's essay, co-written with Harry Henderson and published in their landmark volume A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present, about his friend's life and work. Their piece, in sharp distinction to many others on Lawrence, is remarkable in that it does not take recourse to the language of man with the exception of one instance (which will be discussed below). The "Lawrence" that emerges from their essay therefore does not follow the trajectory from "Negro" to "American" to "humanitarian" or "universal man"; instead, he becomes somebody, especially the young Lawrence just arrived in New York City, haunted by a profound sense of insecurity which was presumably due to the fact that he was uprooted yet one more time during his adolescent years, but also to the abysmal living and employment conditions prevalent in the Harlem of the Great Depression. Lawrence himself remembers the early Harlem years positively though, not in the leas! because this was the period during which he was able to begin an artist's work. However, he readily admits (hat the economic strain placed on its inhabitants and the sheer

60

Juna Gsoels-Lorensen

impossibility of making ends meet, no matter the effort, was extremely debilitating: "Of course, it wasn't wonderful for our parents" (Wheat 28); besides, he himself had to drop out of school in order to help support' his family (Wheat 26-28), a decision that also reduced his time to experiment with art. According to Bearden and Henderson, Lawrence's work is precisely not a testimony to humanity's capacity to overcome every obstacle, but a statement of profound "rage" revealing a "basic feeling'of angry protest" (293, 303) and registering the injustice of a racist society as experienced in the smallest details of daily life-words that hardly ev.er appear in other discussions. II Viewed from this perspective, Lawrence's interest in the "human subject" becomes much more specific and not as readily dissolvable into the ever-widening discourse of "all mankind"; indeed, it remains connected to the exact circumstances of what, every day, he "felt through [... J his eyes"12 in the troubled Harlem of his adolescence. The only time that Bearden and Henderson take recourse to the name of man is by way of negation, when they assert that the words and images of the early Lawrence were "born of his intense rage, protesting the inhumanity of the way black people were forced to live" (303, emphasis added). It seems as if for Bearden and Henderson, who use an entirely different vocabulary to approach Lawrence's work to begin with, the thought of "man," when viewed from the perspective of African American lives during the Great Depression, which left a large majority destitute and impoverished in the "promised land," can only ever arise from the ground of in-humanity, which is to say, from the space of power, systemic exclusion and institutional violence. Consequently, their elaborations can only ever approach the "human subject" in terms of an un-mankind, verging towards the specific historical situation rather than a deceivingly utopian, oblivious universality. It is precisely this single and poignant use of the signifier "human" in their essay that begins to suggest another humanistic practice with regard to Lawrence, one that emerges from inhumanity and that cannot but remain tethered to the negation that is its ground. It therefore does not suffice to supplant one definition of "man" by another one; rather, it is necessary to trace subtle counter-currents in Lawrence's texts that reveal his language of humanism as reflective of the humanism-from-negation that Bearden and Henderson note. What Lawrence refers to as his humanistic practice needs to be understood as an engagement that invokes the name of man as a remainder of in-humanity; thus, to begin uttering the human in his work means to utter it from and with the in-human. As for Lawrence, speaking about the "human subject" is in no way related to the institutionalized discourse of humanism and its

'Like a Sibylline Creature': The Woman Migrant as Humanist Subject

61

sense of a western, male and white culture as the only acceptable tradition, which is what Said never ceases to fulminate against; instead, Lawrence's intention is to accord the lives-temporally deep, as well as spatially far, constituting their own migrant temporalities and geographies-that he, as a young artist, began to discern in the immediacy of the Harlem streets around him: visibility. Therefore, what is referred to as "humanism," or what I would call, taking my cue from Lawrence, an insistence on the "human subject," needs to be rethought from these other projects and articulations of being that, in the face of dire oppression, tyranny or even armed conflict, still remain "moved," as Said reminds us, "by the ideals of justice and equality" (10). Lawrence's humanism from in-humanity is one register, through the means of art, of this uncharted dynamis. To put it in the Saidian language quoted above: it is an attempt to narrate the unsettled, unconstituted energy of migrants, their condition of being ever threatened to become unhoused again; ultimately, the dialectical tension between agency and history (Bilgrami xii) without canceling the heterogeneity of experience. Lawrence has devised a figure that can express this "human subject" of repeated unsettlement: the woman migrant, particularly the single mother with children, like Lawrence's own. In the following part of the essay, I try to establish this figure in a number of Lawrence's early paintings and selected panels of the Migration Series over and against a "humanistic" reading that strives, precisely and constantly, to erase her being for the sake of speaking for "all mankind."

I. Dialoguing the Human Subject In 1968, Carroll Greene conducted an extensive interview with Jacob Lawrence that is housed in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, but which has recently been made available on an internet site devoted to the life and work of Jacob Lawrence, the Jacob and Gwen Knight Lawrence virtual resource center. This interview touches on many questions. What makes it especially relevant to this essay, though, is the way Lawrence repeatedly tries to shy off the categorizations of art criticism, many of which he receives with great unease, while at the same time trying to stake out a notion of humanism that he views as pertinent to his endeavors. When Greene asks him about Influences on his work, Lawrence acknowledges himself to be the "product" of a time in which socially conscious art was of utmost significance: "This was the period for dealing with a very humanistic-we thought about man. We thought about-well, you know this may sound _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ because I guess although you're doing non-

62

Jutta Gsoels-Lorensen

figurative things you're still involved with man, you see. I don't want to sound like that. But I guess it was a figurative involvement; I'll put it that way" (Greene, n.p.). The lacuna is interesting in itself, but what I would like to highlight is the way Lawrence is wrestling with the canonical question of artistic influence through making the language of man he invokes a process of careful deliberation instead of assuming it as a selfevident explanatory code. In the end, however, his discomfort with the narrow parameters of the question prevails, reaching a culminating point in a statement of utter frustration and complete rejection: "I don't wantJo sound like that." Admittedly, this is a small moment in a lengthy oral interview, and Lawrence's reply does not break off at this point; nonetheless, this refusal may serve to glimpse the unease with the language of man as it is shuttling back and forth between the two interview partners. In this instance, Lawrence's answer comes to rest on the term "figure," testifying, as I will further show, to his acute awareness that the language of man, in spite of his efforts to take hold of it and imbue it with difference in this moment, remains trapped in the semantics and politics of a spurious "universal" that is blind to the contradictions and incommensurable moments of its historical narrative. One such blind spot, to invoke Althusser's language, is the radical exclusion of the other calculatively predefined as a non-man of lesser qualities, a second-class or even "zero" citizen. Without doubt, this was a predicament of which African Americans living in the pre-Civil Rights era needed no reminding. One can observe a similar moment earlier in the interview, when Lawrence is asked to reflect on the term "epic," which is one of the most widely used descriptors with regard to his work: CG: I have a feeling, Jacob Lawrence that you are very much taken bythat you have an epic sense. It perhaps derives out of your sense of history, a sense of epic proportion. You mentioned Breughhel [sic!], for example earlier. And you've mentioned Orozco, and Rivera and the kind of things which they were doing, the social realists and so on. And thinking back, say, on your Migration of the Negro series I was beginning to wonder if you were looking up [sic!] yourself perhaps as an artist who was kind of in a sense this chronicler of the black experience in America. I just wondered if you feel this? JL: Yes, this is possible. I've been asked this before in various ways. I don't know. I would say yes. But not consciously on my part. Consciously I think that-and this only comes later-because I've been forced to think about this from questions such as the question you asked-as why, why have I gravi tated toward-or why have I developed this kind of philosophy, or if I am epic, why. And I would rather think that I'm very much interested in the humanistic. Of course, this wouldn't necessarily

'Like a Sibylline Creature': The Woman Migrant as Humanist Subject

63

mean epic either. I don't know why it takes on an epic, you know, kind of thing. CG: Oh, maybe it doesn't. I didn't mean to suggest that. I simply suggested that perhaps you were interested in this almost larger than life type of thing. JL: I don't know. CG: Maybe you're not. (Greene, n.p.) What can be gleaned from this exchange is that Lawrence has had difficulties with the master epithet bestowed on his work. Despite the fact that Greene, to his credit, offers two possible definitions of "epic" in his question, this term is, generally speaking, used in a rather colloquial sense, so much so that Lawrence is hesitant to latch on to it and rather feels he has to refuse an instance of language again. Greene's apologetic reply registers this: "Oh, maybe it doesn't. It did not mean to suggest that." When he offers a revision of his earlier defmition of "epic" as "this almost larger than life type of thing," which appears to reveal a moment of distress in the impromptu character of this articulation, Lawrence falls practically silent. The moment is jarring, as it betrays the tension at work in the idiom that has begun to frame Lawrence's artistic endeavors so insistently. In his initial answer, Lawrence tries to orchestrate a shift from "epic" to "human," when he declares his interest in what he refers to as the "humanistic." In reintroducing a term of his choice, he is at least able to hold the looming dominance of a description with little or no meaning in abeyance and to return to what he himself views as relevant to his work, particularly in his expansive historically inspired series. Their significance, for Lawrence, however, does not lie in a vaguely defmed "epic" character but in the "human subject" of lives as lived, fully emplaced, and, I would like to add, simultaneously invested with the futurality that opens up to other strands of signification. For as Lawrence has never tired to point out: "1 didn't do it as a historical thing, but because I believe these things tie up with the Negro today" (Hills, "Weavings" 145). As can be seen in this exchange, Lawrence does not necessarily propose counter-definitions, but he offers or, perhaps, performs an insistence, namely to keep the place of what is referred to as "human" open, provisional, to afford it a different dynamis in the historical present. One last exchange from this interview may make this evident. When Carroll Greene asks him about his distinctive palette, especially in relation to scenes of unmitigated brutality, he hazards the idea that Lawrence's use of color has a softening effect on the violence that is depicted. Thus, Greene submits: "though the content very often might be very profound and in a sense perhaps morbid in one sense, but somehow the color always

64

Jutta Gsoels-Lorensen

seems to humanize it to a bearable degree." At first, Lawrence seems not entirely averse to this interpretation; ultimately, however, he cannot accept it: JL: I don't know why this is so. I guess my color is relatively pure color. . .I don't deal in tones much; I'm not a tonal painter. CG: That's what I'm getting at. JL: Yes. If this means humanization I don't know. CG: I meant in the sense of warmth. JL: Yes, I know what you mean. (Greene, n.p.)

Color is indeed a prominent aspect of Lawrence's work. Furthermore, it is often, as echoed in this ~uestion, understood as subtending the alleged optimism of his paintings, 3 the sense that, despite the hardship and terror narrated on the panels-the "rage" they show, as Bearden and Henderson might aver-"in the end" heroic overcoming and unstoppable progress will prevail. Upon closer scrutiny, though, Lawrence's colors reveal themselves as highly mobile elements of composition so that the signature yellow of the Migration Series, for example, can travel from a scene of propitious arrival (panel 25) to the menacing absoluteness of Jim Crow segregation in an equally yellow fence (panel 49), hardly a sign of being in the service of unstoppable advancement. In this context, Richard Powell's effort to intervene in another terminological mainstay of Lawrence criticism, namely that of "struggle" (and again, this has a precedent in Lawrence's own explications), is highly appropriate, because he suggests that "struggle" signifies "conflict instead of progress" (158) and that, in the face of what he regards as a "core American spirit of violence and antipathy," open revolt is the ultimate path to liberation in Lawrence's paintings (159). Powell gleans this from a series of the same name executed between 1954-56, Struggle ...From the History of the American People, which serves as his prime example, but the significance of his argument is far greater. In this exchange with Carroll Greene, Lawrence does not spell out his dissatisfaction, but he is certainly not willing to legitimize transcoding the bright, often pure, colors of his palette into a gentle, essentially defunct, social criticism. The idiom of the human has reappeared with yet another, startling, agenda, namely as a veritable signifier of unassailable progress. Yet the mollifying gesture it is poised to perform is entirely unacceptable to Lawrence, who, at the moment his paintings are set to bask in some kind of human "warmth," shuts down the topic. With Bearden and Henderson in mind, one could say that this is precisely not the humanistic practice, relieved of the inhumanity which is its grounding, to which Lawrence could ever subscribe.

'Like a Sibylline Creature': The Woman Migrant as Humanist Subject

65

In sum, throughout his career, Lawrence will insist on a humanistic project, but not without anxiety. He repeatedly invokes categories like "man" or "mankind," but, rather than allowing these terms to take flight into a universalism, an "all-of-man" homogeneity presumed relevant everywhere with equal force, he always links his sense of humanism to what Said would probably call a contingent historical situation or "historical experience" (Said, Culture xxii). This, as is the case in Said's thinking, does not mean that the historical is the sole determining factor but that to discount it is to place a text under the bell jar of a certain politics of art as apolitical expression or aesthetic ecstasy outside time (Said, Humanism 38); moreover, that the nexus between culture and power that Said has traced so convincingly in his Culture and Imperialism, and without which any discussion of humanism is a mere return to an artificial "safe haven" of what once was, is never up for discussion. Historical experience, in this sense, is not an empirical category; rather, and this is Said's important lesson, it emerges from the work of forging connections, possibly even between apparently disparate events. In the case of the already mentioned exhibition of the Migration Series in Edith Halpert's Downtown Gallery, the inherent connection between artistic expression and its worldly context of production, as well as reception, in 1941 becomes stringent: while Halpert had planned an event that would subsequently give African American artists access to some major galleries in New York City, the opening date of her exhibition, December 9th, 1941, two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, sufficed to place her undertaking under a question mark. To say it differently: when Japanese fighter planes finally brought World War II to the doorsteps of the United States, an exhibition of contemporary African American art began to slide towards the impossible. Thus, as Lawrence was aware, gallery owners and art dealers became "timid," "apprehensive" and eventually "retrenched" (Greene n.p.). This radical connectedness, the realization of the complexity of "historical experience," lies, I claim, at the center of what the "human subject" may mean in Lawrence's work. As his assessment of this situation shows, these are not vapid-Said would say "transitionless" (Said, Humanism 80}-conjunctions but the historically constituent events of being, i.e. of the "human subject" as process, that a critical, democratic and humanist praxis needs to acknowledge, address and interpret. In an almost uncanny way, the interview with Carroll Greene symptomatically reveals, through the difficulties brought about by his predetermining definitions, that the name "humanism," so insistently invoked by Lawrence, can only begin to bear meaning again when challenged and addressed by an ongoing, critical process that will open it to cast and

66

Julta Gsoels-Lorensen

receive connections, especially those of which the name and praxis of humanism has been deprived and denied.

II. Tracing the Woman Migrant as Single Mother Lawrence's discomfort with the language offered to frame his work takes on an entirely different dimension in his images, where he is in fiis preferred element of expression, and where his sense of the "human subject" takes on a poignancy that is not as readily available in the prompted and prefiguring reflections of an interview situation. A case in point is his Migration Series, which has been understood in terms of the Biblical Exodus from oppression to deliverance, a story that, no doubt, is of singular importance to African Americans in the US. However, this master narrative also serves-and this is its bestowal from hegemonic American self-representation and its abiding rhetoric of American exceptionalism-to place the "human subject" into the realm of a symbolic that translates or, perhaps, swiftly sublates, the travails of the specific labor migrations constituting the "Great Migration," into a story of striving and self-improvement pertaining to all mankind. Yet, despite the significance of the biblical story, I would like to propose that Lawrence's representation is crucially shaped by a Saidian understanding of "historical experience" or "worldly context" to which Lawrence was, possibly often intuitively, supremely attentive. Panel 6 of the Migration Series shows a train compartment filled with people. The floor boards, like a geometric interpretation of the idea of ascent, seem to materialize the daunting "steps" this migration involves; their bulky volume occupies the center of the panel, compositionally on par with the figures by which it is flanked in a picture plane divided into roughly three equal parts. The figures themselves are evenly distributed on the benches of the compartment, always two to a row. One woman, however, receives distinction: a mother nursing a child, the only figure that does not have a fellow traveler at her side. In addition, she is clearly marked by a piece of luggage placed on the floorboards next to her. This suitcase is flung open, as if to beckon the viewer to see something, namely this mother, undertaking the journey alone. Although this image presents a moment of great harmony, hence lends itself readily to the "symbolicizing," biblically inspired readings alluded to above, the tranquility seems somewhat unsettled, especially in view of the dominance of the floorboards that have been transformed into obtrusive steps. Also, as I have claimed elsewhere, there is a disjunction between the script, which speaks about the "packed" train, and the image that does not allow this sense of crowdedness to materialize (Lorensen

'Like a Sibylline Creature': The Woman Migrant as Humanist Subject

67

578). Hence, I see a mother and a child harmoniously united in a panel that is nevertheless not bereft of a hint of foreboding, and whose destination, as suggested by the very top of the panel, is a door that opens to a night of dark green color which does not seem to offer any signs of promise. Instead, it finds a strong echo in panel 46, whose composition repeats the centrality of the stairs as well as the door down to their chromatic realization. Its subject matter, entirely devoid of any suggestion of an improved living situation for the migrants, concerns the dreary and unhealthy conditions of the labor camps in the North: "Industries attempted to board their labor in quarters that were oftentimes very unhealthy. Labor camps were numerous." The mother and the child are a vision of bliss; yet, the panel, through the compositional context it creates for this pair, does not release it from its worldliness or from "historical experience"; instead it offers instances of disjunction, however subtle, that betray a tension in the quiet of this intimate moment. In light of this, it is imperative to remind oneself, as Juanita Marie Holland does, that traveling, presumably "a fairly benign and common practice," was "fraught with dangers and humiliations for black Americans" during this period (40). This is very apropos Lawrence's images because, in view of Holland's observation, what is understood as the single, mythical movement from South to North, from oppression to the "promised land," actually reveals itself as a journey of great risk, often undertaken in a number of installments over time, in movements of "secondary migrations," as Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson refer to them (Hine and Thompson 217). The necessity of these divided and deferred arrivals was connected to the economic strain such a transition placed on families as well as kinship networks and often reflected the desire to relocate the entire family only once jobs and housing had been secured. These difficulties find expression in panels 27, 30, 33 and 34 of the Migration Series, all of which show members of the African American community actively involved in these consequential decisions. Nevertheless, they also speak about the costs involved. In panel 33, for example, Lawrence comments on the radical breaks and incisions that the experience of migration meant when he shows a woman reading a letter from the North: beside her, on the bed, sits a female child, who covers her face with her hands, possibly wiping away tears. The letter, as the accompanying script has it, speaks about the better living conditions found in the North. Despite this positive note, however, the panel remains suffused by a sense of loss and the emotional strain of having to withstand the difficult separation. As if to augment this, the bed, executed in dark shades of green without any pattern but three bold stripes (a striking

68

luna Gsoels-Lorensen

contrast to the colorful quilts found in other images), bears the traces of a coffin. Furthermore, the composition constructs a view of the room from the unusual position behind the head of the bed, from which poini the female figure becomes nearly inverted, as if mirroring the emotional turmoil of the situation. Undoubtedly Lawrence's Migration Series is a narrative of incredible energy that seemingly propels the migrants past any obstacles. Nonetheless, panels such as these suggest that what has b~en assembled under the name "Great Migration" needs to be understood as a series of contingent events much more complex than the South-North trajectory with its ideological investments allows one to grasp. In terms of Lawrence's Migration Series this means allowing the "unsettled energy" (Said, Humanism 81) of migrants to come to performance outside and beyond the catalogue of causes and consequences that lend it its conventional description. The incisive research of Darlene Clark Hine, whose distinction is the careful attention paid to the issue of gender in the context of the Great Migration, points to another story yet (Hine, "Gender" 127-146; Hine and Thompson 21:;1-239; Moore, 107). As Hazel Carby reminds us, "the train, which had symbolized freedom and mobility for men in male blues songs," constituted "a mournful signal of imminent desertion and future loneliness" (Griffin 19) from the perspective of many women. Moreover, Hine and Thompson claim that for an African American woman wishing to undertake this journey herself, even alone, the situation posed serious problems, because she exposed herself to incalculable risks, vulnerable as she was, due to the "low esteem" (217) she was held in, to all kinds of advances, especially sexual depredations. For "[nJo white man had to fear prosecution for sexually attacking a black woman. And all black women, of whatever class or reputation, had to fear sexual assault, exploitation, and rape" (215, their emphasis). Hence, when an African American woman, like the one in panel 6 of the Migration Series, determined to migrate north she had to plan the trip meticulously, relying, if possible, on routes that did not take her outside the extended family network. The mother in panel 6, in a series that places such great emphasis on a sense of community, is traveling alone with her child: Has she decided to leave the South to escape an existence of which virtually every aspect was outside her control? To flee poverty and hard labor, the fruits of which were not hers? The terror of the Klan (Clark-Lewis, 10-22), sexual depredation and the fear of rape, which Hine and Thompson view as one of the most important reasons for leaving? Is she following somebody? Will she be met at her destination, or not? The panel does not resolve these questions, but undoubtedly this image of tranquility and hope has not forsaken the

'Like a Sibylline Creature': The Woman Migrant as Humanist Subject

69

trials of its emergence, something that Lawrence, as the son of migrants and as a resident of Harlem abuzz with the stories of migrants, of "people 'coming up,' another family arriving," as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has quoted him (20), was acutely attuned to. The migratory movement of which his parents were part was in fact a trajectory of many perilous arrivals, not in the least because of the many promises not kept by the "North," a being unsettled not once, but, as Said insists, repeatedly and often at great cost (Said, Humanism 81). Once the "epic," ever sublating interpretation of the Migration Series is toppled from its position of being the predominant reading, Lawrence's panels and their accompanying words make themselves available to reflections that bring their worldliness into relief and that begin to signify the intense moments of separation, anxiety, terror and violence that also lie at the core of the Great Migration, but that are pushed to the side for the sake of reading a "humanism" that narrates a story of self-improvement and universal human striving with lillie regard for their contingent situations, as lived and expressed, crucially, by the woman migrant, especially as mother. 14 During his childhood and adolescence, Lawrence experienced the specific travails of the African American woman migrant every day, as he grew up, together with his siblings, under the tutelage of his mother (Wheat 25).15 His parents had met in Pennsylvania, where they married and had children. When they separated shortly afterwards, possibly because of the hardships they had to endure as a result of their difficult economic situation,16 Lawrence's mother was left to take care of three small children while trying to make a living that would support all of them. In 1927, she decided to relocate to Harlem in hopes of finding more lucrative work and being able to settle there permanently with her family. This, however, meant that she had to leave her family behind in Philadelphia. She was probably aware, as many migrant women were at that time and, for that matter, still are, that it would be impossible for her to combine long working hours with the extensive care and continuous supervision young children need, in particular because her limited employment prospects would most likely lead her into domestic or personal service. The only viable option she had was to separate from them and place them in foster homes temporarily (Wheat 25). Jacob Lawrence, as the eldest of three, was only ten years old at the time. In 1930, three years later, his mother was able to reunite the family and move them to New York City. "Absentee mothering," a decision by dire necessity, was not an uncommon situation for migrant mothers; in fact, I-line and Thompson claim that women routinely had to leave children and other relatives behind, but that it was a moment of greatest pride when

70

Julla Gsoels-Lorensen

they were able to "send for them" (Hine and Thompson 217-218). Thus, from the perspective of the migrant mother, the Great Migration becomes a series of risky and even dangerous displacements that realize little, if not to say nothing, of the dream of self-determination and betterment of station beckoning from up North. A study commissioned by the federal government's New Deal programs summarized the abysmal situation she confronted: ' The problem of Negro domestic workers in the United States, affecting, eighty-five percent of all Negro women workers, demands immediate action by the federal govemment. Their wages, hours, and standards of living, even lower than those of white workers in both rural and urban communities, offer a challenge to American ideals of social legislation. (King-Hammond 81) Lawrence's mother, from what is known, was one of those domestic servants, which meant that she was trying to eke out a living for herself and her children while having to do "the most undesirable and least remunerative of all work available to migrants" (Hine, "Rape" 913).17 Leslie King-Hammond and Ellen Harkins Wheat point to the striking presence of female figures in Lawrence's work: "One easily concludes that Lawrence's characterization of women stems from his observation of the perseverance of the average woman in the Harlem community, who is often poor, works very hard, and also raises a family" (Wheat 68). As equally influential, they perceive his research on African American women leaders, like Harriet Tubman, and his relationship to his wife, Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence, an artist in her own right (Wheat 68; KingHammond 79-82). In spite of the acknowledged presence of women figures in Lawrence's paintings, though, in the end, the paradigm of metaphysical humanism retains its dominance, possibly because it seems to respond to what has been perceived as the "generality" of his representations, the sense that, especially in the Migration Series, which is the touchstone of much Lawrence criticism, the faces of the migrants, with exception of a few, do no receive definition. This does not make them a "sea of hopeful humanity" (Wheat 61); however, in particular since the Migration Series is a narrative that will undermine, as indicated by the unique positioning of the mother and child in panel 6, the assumed forward motion of its performance until it betrays exactly the ideological charge of its purported "advancement," geographically and socially. Even in terms of Lawrence's biography, these years of separation have been converted into a mere detail that does not arrest the story of this specific migrant mother and her son. Only Bearden and Henderson's essay finds

'Like a Sibylline Creature': The Woman Migrant as Humanist Subject

71

wordS that stay the ease, if not complacence, of these descriptions by alluding to "the dislocating impact of these moves on Jacob" as "considerable" (293). In their piece, Lawrence appears as profoundly "upset over his uprooting" (294) in the years after his arrival in Harlem, moreover, afflicted by feelings of "anxiety, anger, frustration, and failure" (295), possibly foreshadowing his later hospital stay. While most accounts of this displacement focus on the opportunity for the future painter to be ri veted by the sights and voices of Harlem, thus trying to derme a kind of thematic intention of his earliest extant works, Bearden and Henderson are unwilling to gloss over this difficult, drawn-out arrival and its circumstances for the sake of a swiftly consolidating humanism of universal mankind. Moreover, I would like to suggest that Bearden and Henderson's essay does not only speak about Lawrence, but that Lawrence's mother begins to appear in it, haunting these utterances as she does some of the women and especially maternal figures in his art. At this point, it may seem as if the work of this essay rested upon the decision to read the Migration Series autobiographically. Yet, although it does invoke an existence in the Harlem of the Great Depression, the figure that is at stake in its process, the figure of the woman migrant, possibly Lawrence's mother, is a projected biographeme at best. Hers is a missing lext, yet "she would come if we worked for her;" I borrow this articulation from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's rereading of Virginia Woolfs appeal to the young Oxbridge women that they allow themselves to be "haunted by the ghost of Shakespeare's sister" (Spivak 35). This specter is not bound to appear simply, but needs to be envisioned, actively, through a reaching out, a projecting oneself, responsibly, in view of the other. The "human subject" of Lawrence's paintings is in dire need of this work, because autobiographical approaches, which exhibit great confidence in the gesture of beginning by way of canceling the act of reading that enables them, as Paul de Man has pointed out (68-9), construct "life" and "experience" in terms of an empiricism imbued with the incontestable force of something authentic. Lawrence's work, however, is striking precisely for its emphatic performance-rather than assumption-of acts of beginning. In the context of his narrative series of the late 1930s and early 1940s, all of which dealt with trenchant moments in the history of the African diaspora, this also meant periods of intense reading and research that preceded his executing the individual paintings. Indeed, Lawrence, as the painter of the Great Migration, spent a considerable amount of time at the 135th Street Branch of the Public Library (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture) in Harlem, a lively hub of cultural exchange,IS which enabled him-and this might, at first glance,

72

lutta Gsoels-Lorensen

seem paradoxical-to read towards his own situation, gathering himself towards a Saidian sense of "historical experience" in which different generations became reconstituted for the sake of a critically recogn'ized community that prompted his making of the Migration Series: "I was a youngster and I heard these stories over and over again...! didn't realize that we were even a part of that...! didn't realize what was happening until about the middle of the 1930's, and that's when the Migration Series began to take form in my mind" (ellipses in original text; Gates 20). For Lawrence, the alleged "chronicler" of the "African American experienc.e," representing the migration movement that also involved his parents was more than a project of excavation and reconstitution: it meant working from his particular situation towards his particular situation by way of a meticulously involved gesture of listening, reading, writing and painting that created precipitously positioned texts, constructed of words and images, that in themselves perform the act of representation in terms of a dynamic textuality of provisional beginnings and endings undercutting the trajectory of progress and the thought of destination as arrest of meaning. There is no record of his mother, as there is none of millions of migrant women who did and still do not have access to the institutions of selfrepresentation; yet Lawrence's visual-verbal "painting-texts" can prompt us to take Spivak's exhortation seriously and initiate the task of "working for her": to follow her into the "detail" into which she has been made to vanish; to refuse, from this "detail," this vanishing by force and system in order to be able to prepare one's welcome for the specter. In 1936, six years after moving to Harlem, Lawrence paints "The Homecoming": a woman returns to her apartment, most likely after a day of work, as suggested through her formal attire and the fact that she carries a bag full of groceries in her right hand. The door to her apartment is open, but the scene as displayed on the painting unfolds entirely in front of it, where she is awaited by three children, presumably hers, who have come to greet her on the staircase. One of them, a boy, is extending his arms in order to relieve his mother of the heavy bag; the others are dashing down the stairs in eager anticipation. The picture exudes a great sense of warmth, both in the enthusiastic welcome of the children and in the range of colors, predominately shades of red, brown and yellow, it displays, although the naked light bulb inside the apartment unmistakably points to the precarious situation in which this family finds itself. The painting shows two boys and one girl, exactly the family constellation of the Lawrence household. A second image, executed two years later, in 1937, is entitled "Moving Day" or, variously, "Dispossessed,,,19 the later of which is an especially resonant title with its suggestion of a power

'Like a Sibylline Creature': The Woman Migrant as Humanist Subject

73

imbalance at work in this moment of yet one more Saidian "unsettlement," hardly a "move up," as suggested in their somber expressions. The image represents a mother and three children carrying their belongings into a new apartment. Indeed, every member of this family is actively involved in this process: the oldest son is loaded with chairs and other things, a task that requires his full concentration, as revealed in his facial expression; his mother balances brooms, some other household items and a basket filled with sundry possessions, including a book and a doll; the daughter to her right has hoisted the younger brother on her shoulders. The mother occupies the center of the painting with all other figures oriented towards her. She is connected to the two siblings on the left of the picture plane through her basket, which constellates them into a compositional unit, as well as through the gesture of the youngest child who tries to get her attention by extending one of his hands towards her, beckoning his mother. Yet she is also linked to the boy on the right through her own watchful glance, which ensures that he does not collapse under the precipitous load on his head, shoulders and arms. This watchful glance can be translated, in terms of Lawrence's life, into his mother's decision to enroll him in the day-care program of the Utopia Children's House for the periods when she could not be home to supervise her children. There he began exploring the materials put at his disposal under the able tutelage of Charles Alston, who recognized his talent and became his first mentor. 20 Given this situation, one could say that his beginnings as a painter are intimately connected to his being the son of an African American migrant mother during the Great Depression in Harlem, which placed her at a systemically entrenched disadvantage keeping her on the lowest rungs of the urban working class with long hours and little time to spare for her family. Hence, to invoke Said, Lawrence's very beginnings as an artist are tethered to "the real historical world from whose circumstances none of us can in fact ever be separated, not even in theory" (Said, Humanism 48). The depiction of the mother and her three children might or might not be autobiographically inspired;21 yet this is not the conclusive issue here. One of its insistences, when viewed with regard to the humanistic practice that this essay wants to trace, is its representation of the "dispossessed" not through traditional portraiture, which would have been a precedent in terms of African American painting during that period (Holland 24, 30), but as the time of relocation, "Moving Day," which shows the migrant mother, in the moment of Saidian "unsettlement," not in the pose of the individualized subject, but as Constituted through the children and objects which cannot be subtracted from her being. As Elizabeth Clark-Lewis's interviews with 97 aged

74

Jutta Gsoels-Lorensen

migrant women who had come from the rural South to the Washington DC area in the first three decades of the twentieth century, make amply clear, Lawrence's visual statement of dependence and responsibility by the same token manifests a particularly disturbing vulnerability, since, as her interview partners attest, it was well-known that most migrant women, due to the precarious economic situation of their families, could not afford to resign from their jobs, no matter how abusive the employment relationship they found themselves in. This then lies in the watchful glance traveling from mother to son: the possibility of a continuous "moving day" for-the migrant mother in the Harlem of the Great Depression, i.e. a time of repeated unsettlement from which a "humanist subject" emerges that is released neither from "the world" nor from the address of community constituting itself in view ofher. 22 The space/time relations Lawrence constructs in these two images are especially noteworthy. Twice, this family finds itself, as it were, preplaced. For the mother greets her children not in the place they live in, but on the staircase; the apartment represented in "Moving Day" is yet bare of all furnishings, not quite a new home, although the family is already present. Lawrence shows these families, possibly his own, in a transitional moment, the moment of arriving-not of being there-with all figures in motion. In both instances, the spatial composition does not receive them but remains imbued with a striking otherness that creates an emphatic tension in the image. Thus, what the title identifies as a "homecoming" is a scene as if pre-happening on the staircase and not in the "home" per se; moreover, this pre-place builds a tension with the warm colors and delicate emotions of the image in that it pits them against a floor space executed as a gray, geometrical grid whose unyielding rigor seems, through its point of flight, to propel the figures towards the opened apartment door; as if to sweep them hastily from public view. The second image with its alternative titles, both telling, represents an unsettlement that also reveals the vulnerability of the family. The few possessions the family carries are an indication of their dire economic situation. Moreover, the mother is presented as juggling a number of tasks here: executing the move, casting a watchful glance at her older son, while at the same time hearing the address by her youngest child. She is an extraordinarily tender, reaching figure, precisely the "human subject," I submit, that might have crossed Lawrence's mind when he stalled the language of the interview discussed at the beginning of this essay. In neither of these images this migrant woman has come to rest or reached an "end"; instead, she remains cmcially pre-placed, in arrival repeatedly, while trying to inhabit, quite literally in the second image, the space surrounding, but not harboring her.

'Like a Sibylline Creature': The Woman Migrant as Humanist Subject

75

There is no indication of upward social mobility in this image, no "North" s promise, which is not surprising in light of the ever worsening ~onditions prevalent in Harlem in the I930s, hence no sense of having arrived. Instead, this woman migrant, suspended between address and care in a space of repeated unsettlement, begins to exemplify Lawrence's other humanism from inhumanity, from the ground of bereavement, loss, distance, separation and radical disenfranchisement. As a migrant mother, possibly Lawrence's own, this image of a woman figure begins to spell a humanism that remains foundationally tethered to the Saidian "world" of power, culture, socio-economic impact and politics, a figure that will not bow to a definition of "man" that remains devoid of the question ofjustice. In The Life of Harriet Tubman (1940), a series executed immediately before the Migration Series (1941) and therefore in immediate conversation with it, Lawrence constructs yet another instantiation of the migrant woman. No doubt, Tubman's situation is fundamentally different from that of the women figures discussed above; nonetheless, placing them in relation to each other, while maintaining their specificity, allows me to chart a humanistic practice in Lawrence's work that is daring and urgent in its insistence on undoing any anthropologically informed notions of man. In his panels on Tubman, Lawrence, more than in any of his other works, constructs a special tension between figure and space, a representational strategy that stmctures large parts of this series with striking effect. In panel 10, Harriet, after experiencing much hardship as a slave, including a near-fatal blow to her head (panel 5), sets out on her hazardous journey. In the painting, she is literally breaking free from the shackles of slavery, represented by the links of a chain behind her feet, threatening to clutch her one last time. Her body is pulled forth by her hand, which gestures to the stars navigating her north. It is defined by a powerful stride ahead. Yet, despite the determination that her posture bespeaks, the tension in her figure is tremendous: her body is nearly twisted around itself with her head thrust violently backwards, sending a furtive glance behind her where the threat of capture looms. Lawrence also Uses this glance for the occurrence of Tubman's so-called arrival in panel 13, in which she, in an eminently anti-climactic moment, reaches safe territory, only to feel profound solitude and disorientation. But the risk of her endeavor is not only behind her: it determines the entire landscape surrounding her, a landscape moreover that is a chaotic assemblage of forms and colors enveloping her completely. Similar to the images of the family in Harlem, Lawrence's composition pits figure, space and word against each other. In this instance, Tubman steps into a space of otherness clearly inimical to her undertaking. The night sky may present some

76

Jutta Gsoels-Lorensen

comfort, but other, more figural elements-the bare trees and a hissing serpent, also representing slaverl J-add to the terror of the landscape that awaits Tubman, as ifready to submerge her completely. Indeed, if it were not for her white garment, her figure would blend into the forms entirely, as her body has already absorbed some of the lines that structure especially the lower half of the panel, for example the striking diagonality of line that materializes in a large number of the landscape shapes. In a way, despite the small comforting vision of the beckoning hand and the star-studded sky, it is a landscape that cannot be read, a space that does not assemble into a path upon which Tubman could travel. It literally cannot be predicted, pre-said or pre-named. Hence it becomes another instantiation of the anticipatory placement I suggested in "Homecoming" and "Moving Day": only this time its effect is sheer terror, as Tubman begins to project, literally, her traveling body against the injustice of a system militating against precisely any such act of self-determination. Perhaps, though, the random shapes and forms of panel 10 do not constitute what could be called a "landscape," which in itself implies a historically in(lexed vision of space, but instead function to put under erasure precisely any distinction between "figure" and "background." In this series, Lawrence, it seems, is intent on working with the concept of pictorial space-drawing it near, pushing it into the distance, dissolving its forms towards the unrecognizable-very consciously, as can be observed in panels 15, 16, 17, 18, 19,20,26,29,30 and, most poignantly, in 31, which concludes it. What is striking about these panels is that Tubman will shift in and out of view: at times she can be seen hurrying across wide open terrain with a group of her charges; in others, and this is quite jarring, she remains entirely concealed, which leaves the viewer staring into a space of natural elements staving off the desire for the lost human figure. This series uses elements of biography to chart Tubman's daring provocation to the institution of slavery; yet, Lawrence will not hesitate to represent this story through panels in which her figure, or any human figure, is entirely absent, and which put the viewer's gaze, so attentively directed in other instances, as with the suitcase in panel 6 of the Migration Series, at a loss. This vision-at-loss, moreover, becomes an ever-greater irritation, because it reveals a gaze that has been thwarted, that has been tampered with against the desire to "take her in" through the eye: Have I missed seeing Tubman in some corner of the painting? Am I unable to see her, because she is sheltered by the trees? Am I not allowed to see her? Am I, in fact, engaging in the task of a potential persecutor, scouring? In these panels, in particular, in II, 18 and 31 (although 12 and 15 could also be placed in this context, as they exhibit a tiny Tubman figure, nearly

'Like a Sibylline Creature': The Woman Migrant as Humanist Subject

77

overwhelmed by the space through which she hurries), Lawrence forces the viewer to assume a position in front of this remarkable woman and her journeys of great risk. In the last panel of the Migration Series, panel 60, Lawrence returns the gaze by way of the sudden, full frontality of the migrants' pose (Lorensen 582-584); in the series on Harriet Tubman, he effects an address through his manipulation of the already manifest tension between "figure" and "background": as if to cause a disturbance, through thwarting the viewer's comfortable, even voyeuristic gaze, putting it repeatedly at a loss, in the questing for the heroic struggle of "universal man" in the life of a woman whose repeated journeying back and forth between safety and illegality, until emancipation, never allowed danger to be overcome as a past of fortitude and courage displayed, but as ever accumulating evidence of having been-which is to say, continuing to be-in courageous defiance of the law all along, a condition that, as Tubman was certainly fully aware, amounted to an ever greater risk of being subjected to unspeakably harsh punishment should she be captured. Although Lawrence himself, as indicated at the beginning, will use the rhetoric of the mankind's universal desire to improve his lot, it is this series on Tubman, in particular, which declines these words towards the interventionist practice that I tried to introduce, borrowing from Bearden and Henderson, as a humanism emerging from inhumanity that does not lose sight of a social, political and cultural emplacement, i.e., which remains in view of a historical present. The unpredictability of the "landscape" in panel 10 takes on yet another dimension in the subsequent spatiality of flight, as represented in panels II to 20, for it becomes evident that the variegated spaces Lawrence constructs are endowed with radically different signification dependent on the situation of the relevant panel. In this sense, nature can be sheltering, i.e., providing Tubman with the cover she needs to evade her persecutors, but it can also become a terror, ruthlessly exposing her to them, if not participating in the hunt for her itself, as in panel 18, which will be discussed below. There is no unity to the space as it works in this series; it is a highly dynamic element instead of a "background," whose importance is on the same level, I would contend, as the Tubman figure herself. Panel II uses compositional elements that are recurrent throughout the series: a dense, green forest placed on strips of black and brown soil under a nocturnal, star-studded sky. Tubman is nowhere to be seen, screened, it seems-and this is the moment of the gaze at loss-from pursuit. The panel is dominated by a pinkish cloud, hovering over a dense forest, which exhibits the shape of a threatening hand reminiscent of the Overseer in panel 5, who dealt the young Tubman a blow so severe it could

78

Jutta Gsoels-Lorensen

have been lethal. Color as well as brush strokes are the same, and his spindly fingers seem to lend their shape to the cloud. This panel is accompanied by the unmitigated force of the reward poster for Tubman's capture. Lawrence, who will consciously alternate between using direct quotes and narration, in this instance confronts the visual representation of Tubman's flight with the unmediated voice of the slave system, which saw itself as perfectly justified in asking for the restitution of a human bein'g desperate to escape from a system of inhumane exploitation, from being, as the words suggests, "my negro girl" (panel 11), the racist condescension of which expression is especially stinging. The landscape of unpredictability receives its full articulation in this panel, which shows the entire space dominated by the hand of injustice and resounding with the words from the reward poster.2 4 While the trees constitute, as manifested in the narrative to the subsequent image, a shelter for her, the verbal and spatial utterances in this panel collude in making any place for her impossible. For the forest, now from the perspective of the slave system, is an essential part of the trajectory of escape that makes her, through an ontology of utmost brutality and, in it, by simple fact of her location, a criminal, absconding herself from the place of being rightfully owned by her slave master. Lawrence gave no face to this collusion in totality; before the words of the reward notice, he cannot constitute a figure discernible to the eye. And yet, Lawrence's "human subject" is present. What is so startling about the Tubman series is its obstinate dissolution of the self-conscious centrality of the human being; its sustained challenge to what Derrida has called the unassailable "unity of man" (35) in the name of a different humanistic practice that at no point can eschew the contingencies and complexities of its situation, while remaining in view of the other and its community-to-come. This finds strong expression in panel 18, which shows the already familiar landscape reduced to a vaguely floral composition of the repeatedly used pinkish hands, now dotted with eyes of all sizes, scouring the landscape for Tubman. Panel 18 is the clearest expression of fear and terror in this vein because it has even turned the otherwise benevolent stars towards her persecution: "'Have you seen Harriet Tubman?'" Lawrence quotes a sentence that, in conjunction with the picture, takes on the quality of total ubiquity in a landscape that has been converted into a space of all eyes, a strong statement about relentless pursuit. Yet Tubman remains invisible in this denuded space with its periscoping, strangely fantastic fronds; nonetheless, it is clear that what Lawrence has called the "human subject" has not left the scene. Said's humanism is preconditioned on a notion of man as agent of change, a

'Like a Sibylline Creature': The Woman Migrant as Humanist Subject

79

"human maker" (Said, Humanism 11), something that also resonates with the late work of Lawrence which concentrates, more and more, on laborers, especially builders. Yet, the "human subject" emerging from this particular series suggests a humanism that, despite the highlighted agency of the Tubman figure, presents itself in the form of a woman migrant in indissoluble relation to the space across which she flees of necessity but also in the name of hope and promise. No doubt, Tubman is cast as an agent of change, but Lawrence's representation of her veers beyond thisin this instance possibly even slightly delimiting-description: if she be a "human maker," she needs to be understood as an "agent" whose moment of agency is precisely her entire body-in-transversal, projecting itself north across the space of her flight repeatedly, obsessively. Neither "unity" nor "man," her acts of self-determination, and these include her piloting friends and relatives north, show her as manifesting another time of being that always remains, even in the safety of the north, haunted by the injustice that will not yield: "So she went, nineteen times liberating over 300 pieces of living, breathing 'property'" (panel 15). Derrida's essay, "The Ends of Man," offers a name for this: "proximity" (45), a term gleaned from Martin Heidegger's thought: "It is within the enigma of a certain proximity, a proximity to itself and a proximity to Being that we shall see constituting itself against humanism and against metaphysical anthropologism, another instance of man, [... ]" (45). Derrida's thinking in this piece has the great merit of being exceedingly vigilant as regards any clandestine reintroduction of a man of "properties" (45), of "having language" or "having reason." Lawrence's humanistic project with its biographically inspired series might at first sight also seem beholden to the idea of constructing a "unity of man"; yet, in his migrant woman figures, especially in the Harriet Tubman series, he initiates a "human subject" that refuses to be thought from itself as center and instead takes shape from the moment of its pre-placement, which also allows "historical experience" to emerge. The final panel of the Tubman series is especially striking in this regard: it is devoted to her old age and death, as well as the recognition she received for her work. However, in the panel, Tubman remains absent; instead it exhibits a landscape that, by now, is well-known to the viewer. Although the last few panels have shown Tubman during daytime, the fmal panel turns to a nocturnal space Imbued with a sense of great clarity, possibly a nod to Frederick Douglass's leiter of appreciation to Harriet Tubman (Wheat, Douglass 39): the night is beautiful with its starry sky and a glimmer of the moon behind a cloud drifting by. The ground has divided itself into hues of brown and blue, land and water, presumably. The trees are leafless, but, rather than

80

Jutta Gsoels-Lorensen

exhibiting the jagged shapes they often do in conjunction with an image dominated by violence or threat, these limbs seem to undulate into the space of the night more organically. One last time, Tubman has vanished from sight. Rather than achieving elevated station in her death, a telos, Lawrence represents yet another of the landscapes that have accompanied the viewer throughout. It is an ambiguous space, however, that, barren as it is, does not dissolve into an entirely tranquil night. Nevertheless, it makes a strong statement about "proximity" as the "inseparability" (Derrida 54) of the "human subject" and its Being, here expressed as space, a space shaped most prominently, although this does not exhaust its urgency, by Tubman's multiple transversals, each one of them entirely unpredictable and an occasion of great risk. In the Tubman figure, the travails of the woman migrant are brought to culmination: she is all pre-placement, continuously in arrival and departure until the day all slaves gain freedom; unthinkable as a "portrait," she is rather a woman shelter, a "mother" between address and care; a "human subject" from a system of profound inhumanity. To conc1u<je, Lawrence's insistence on what could be called a "humanist practice" becomes an instance of the critique of humanism "in the name of humanism" as Said has proposed it. Lawrence's work is beleaguered by explications focusing on his purported interest in the universality of man; yet, while most of them think nothing of dissolving the specificity of "historical experience" lurking in his work, Lawrence quietly moves closer to a different instantiation of the "human subject" in his paintings, one that is prepared to push against its metaphysical parameters in favor of reconstituting itself from other "ends" of man (Derrida 54). Accordingly, the appellation "Moses of the people," by which Tubman was referred to, cannot remain unqualified: in panel 17, she is struck by lightning, a yellow figure outlined in the blue electricity from above. She is recognizable, but also clearly stands apart in the eerie hues which dominate this panel. Moreover, her body is flung into all directions in a moment of ecstasy: "Like a half-crazed sibylline creature, she began to haunt the slave masters, stealing down in the night to lead a stricken people to freedom." Hardly the Harriet Tubman we have come to know, but the figure of a woman migrant, like many others, who would "come if we worked for her."

'Like a Sibylline Creature': The Woman Migrant as Humanist Subject

81

Notes I Prior to this, Lawrence had already received acclaim by participating in three solo-exhibitions and more than ten group exhibitions. Most importantly in this context, his Toussaint L 'Ouverture series was shown in the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1939 (Tepfer 130). 2 Especially to somebody trained in narrative expression, this decision to dissect a continuous text according to a numerical principle, might seem an outrageous act. The commercial aspect of painting, however, did not leave much choice but to accept this arrangement. Otherwise the series would most likely have been completely dispersed and could never have been seen in its entirety again. The MoMA and the Phillips Collection contractually agreed that they would lend the missing panels to each other in order to facilitate exhibition of the Migration Series the way it was conceived (Tepfer 136-7). 3 Ellen Harkins Wheat, the author of the only single-authored monograph on Lawrence's life and work to date, also relies on Bearden and Henderson's assessment of this situation (101). 4 Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins and Richard J. Powell are two important exceptions to this, and their interventions go a long way towards interrogating the predictable psychoanalytical interpretations that Lawrence's work has received in the aftermath of his stay in Hillside Hospital (LeFalle-Collins 129-131; Powell 147). S The question concerning Lawrence's wide appeal is dubious for its nonrecognition of the tacit exclusions, indicative of the hegemonic system within which it is articulated, which were shaping what was allowed to emerge as "his work" to begin with, i.e., for its avoiding to confront itself as a rhetorical gesture erasing the long history of racial oppression the United States with one stroke. Patricia Hills' work is very interesting in this regard; it shows that this "wide appeal" did not stop short of ideological decisions, both in the Downtown Gallery, as well as in a subsequent edition of Fortune Magazine, that prevented a number of Lawrence's paintings with disturbing depictions of segregation and unmitigated iiolence, from being shown or published (Patricia Hills, 2003: 28-36). Richard Powell's contribution to Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence is a case in point: although his essay is consciously pitted against the rcadings of Lawrence's work that cast it as first and foremost "humanitarian" and "stylistically conservative," hence failing to place it into the larger social, historical and political context (147-8), his argument will, in the latter part of the essay which discusses a painting in Lawrence's series Struggle ...From the History of the American People, 1954-6, return to this language: "The implicit narrative here is the universal, uphill 'battle' with life, and the inevitable feelings of personal entrapment and loss that all human beings experience" (my emphasis; 159).

82

JUlla Gsoels-Lorensen

Carroll Greene, "Oral History Interview with Jacob Lawrence," October 26, 1968. This interview can be found under "Research Resources" on the Jacob i:md Gwen Knight Lawrence virtual resource center, which links to http://www.aaa.si.eduicollectionsioralhistoriesitranscriptsilawren68.htm the website of the Smithsonian Institute of Washington, DC (Accessed November 201h , 2007). The transcript is not paginated; hence all further quotations will be cited without page numbers. The Jacob and Gwen Knight Lawrence virtual resource center can be found under the following address: http://www.jacobandgwenlawrence.org/artandlife02.html. (Accessed November 20th,2007) 8 To be very clear: this essay is not driven by the arrogance of explaining Lawrence's words to himself, but by the firm conviction that his language of man is connected to his visual texts in ways more complicated than a one-sided dimension of biographical elucidation. 9 The reference to "uniquely American voices" needs to be seen in the context of Said's insistence that the critic or intellectual not simply assume a place ofwriting, but to declare this place of writing, publicly and self-critically. Said does so at the beginning of chapter one, which starts with a thick, consciously contextualized "I" multiplely supplemented in the course of the first paragraph. 10 For further information on the Great Migration, see Nicholas Lemann's The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How /t Changed America; Joe W. Troller's entry on "MigrationlPopulation" in the Encyclopaedia of African American Culture and History; and the collection of essays, edited by Joe William Troller Jr., called The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions ofRace, Class and Gender. II Patricia Hills's discussion of Lawrence's commission from Fortune magazine to paint the South post-World War II strikes a similar tone: her archival work represents Lawrence as irate about the institutionalized racism he witnessed on a daily basis (Hills 2003, 28-36). It also appears in Richard Powell's contribution, "Harmonizer of Chaos: Jacob Lawrence at Midcentury" to Over the Line: The Art and Life ofJacob Lawrence (147-163). 12 Aline B. Louchheim quotes this suggestive phrase in her article on Lawrence's hospital stay for the New York Times Magazine on October 15, 1950, 35. 13 Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins has aptly summarized this as the claim of a certain "kindergarten gaiety" (Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins, 122). Generally speaking, Elizabeth Steele and Susana M. Halpine offer valuable insights into Lawrence's use of color (155- 159). 14 There is, as I maintain in "Between Image and Word, Color and Time: Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series," also the remembrance of slavery operative in this image. This is more clearly spelled out in the script to panel 2 of the virtually contemporaneous series on The Life of Frederick Douglass, 1939: "One of the barbarous laws oft/le slave system was that of hiring out members of families who were slaves, this occurring in the Douglass family. The only recollections he had of his mother were those hasty visits she made to him at night." See Peter T. 7

'Like a Sibylline Creature': The Woman Migrant as Humanist Subject

83

Nesbett and Michelle DuBois, Jacob Lawrence: Paintings, Drawings, and Murals (1935-1999). A Catalogue Raisonne, 38. Il Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson, 293-294; This information can also be found under "Art and Life" on the Jacob and Gwen Knight Lawrence virtual resO/lrce center, http://www.jacobandgwenlawrence.org/artandlife02.html. (Accessed November 20th, 2007) 16 This is the way Bearden and Henderson see it: "But hard times came, and he became a cook on a railroad dining car, called only when needed. The job took him away from his family, and the lack of steady work added to family problems and discord. [... J Their marital differences mounted and finally they separated" (Bearden and Henderson, 293). 17 Hine, Thompson and Clark-Lewis leave no doubt as to the fact that African American women migrants were given the lowest paying jobs with the longest hours and often, in particular during the Great Depression, were barely able to make ends meet (Clark-Lewis, 342, Hine and Thompson, 214). 18 The library, as a center of activities, was a stimulating place that encouraged vibrant exchange. Patricia Hills quotes Lawrence as saying that the library became "alive for us. I would hear stories from librarians about various heroes and heroines" (Patricia Hills 1994,43). 19 This second title is listed under "Remarks" pertaining to this painting in Jacob Lawrence: Paintings, Drawings, and Murals (1935-/999). A Catalogue Raisonne. Apparently, it is not clear to whom this altemative title can be attributed (23). 20 "Chronology" of Over the Line: The Art and Life ofJacob Lawrence, 25. 21 The entry under the year 1935 in the chronology featured in Over the Line: The Life and Arl ofJacob Lawrence, states this as follows: "Begins painting scenes of life in Harlem, using commercial tempera (poster) paints on lightweight brown paper. Several early paintings depict his immediate environment, including his studio and life at home with his family" (26). II For me, this also finds strong expression in panel 7 of the series on Frederick Douglass: "Douglass, forced by his master to discontinue his leaming, continued his studies with his white friends who were in school" (as quoted in the Calalogue Raisonne, 38). The panel, to concentrate on the most relevant aspect, displays Lawrence and his friends at a table, hunched over two books; paper and quill are at their disposal on the side of the table. This scene of education, however, is Supplemented by a large, yellow bucket as well as by a prominent broom so as to say that this moment of leaming occurs in spite of, while within, the hard labor and l;nPossible self-determination that the condition of being enslaved meant. Patricia Hills links this serpent to Frederick Douglass, who used the term "snake" to refer to a ruthless slave foreman (Hills, 1993: 50). This connection is also suggested by the presence of the snake in panelS, which shows Harriet prostrate on the floor after having received an injurious blow to her head by an ~4ver~eer.

HIlls offers an entirely different reading: she views panels 17 and 18 as "all of nature watching out for Tubman." 1 think the compositional elements bear out a less Optimistic reading (Hills, 1993: 53).

84

lutla Gsoels-Lorensen

Works Cited Bearden, Romare and Harry Henderson. A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993. Bilgrami, Akeel. "Foreword." Humanism and Democratic Criticism. Edward W. Said. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. ix-xiii. Brown, Milton W. Jacob Lawrence. New York: Whitney Museum 'Of American Art, 1974. Clark-Lewis, Elizabeth. "Domestic Workers in the North." Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia. vol. I. Ed. Darlene Clark Hine. Brooklyn: Carlson Publ. Inc, 1993. 340-342. -. Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics and the Great Migration. New York: Kodansha International, 1994. de Man, Paul. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Derrida, Jacques. "The Ends of Man." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 30.1 (September 1969): 31-57. DuBois, W.E.~. The Souls ofBlack Folk. Dover Thrift Editions, 1994. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. "New Negroes, Migration and Cultural Exchange." Jacob Lawrence. The Migration Series. Ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner. Washington, DC: The Rappahannock Press in assoc. with The Phillips Collection, 1993. 17-21. Greene, Carroll. "Oral History Interview with Jacob Lawrence." the Jacob and Gwen Knight Lawrence virtual resource center, October 26, 1968. http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/lawren68.htm. (Accessed November 20 th , 2007). Griffin, Farah Jasmine. 'Who Set You F1owin'?' The African-American Migration Narrative. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Harvey, William R. "Foreword." Jacob Lawrence. The Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman Series of 1938-1949. Ed. Ellen Harkins Wheat. Hampton: Hampton University Museum in assoc. with University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 199 I. Hills, Patricia. "Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series: Weavings of Pictures and Texts." Jacob Lawrence. The Migration Series. Ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner. Washington, DC: The Rappahannock Press in assoc. with The Phillips Collection, 1993. 141-154. - . "Jacob Lawrence as Pictorial Grio!: The Harriet Tubman Series." American Art7.J (Winter 1993): 40-59. - . "The Prints of Jacob Lawrence: Chronicles of Struggles and Hopes." Jacob Lawrence. Thirty Years of Prints (1963-1993): A Catalogue

'Like a Sibylline Creature': The Woman Migrant as Humanist Subject

85

Raisonmi., Ed. Peter Nesbett. Seattle and London: Francine Seders Galley Ltd. in assoc. with University of Washington Press, 1994. 1518. _. '''In the Heart of the Black Belt': Jacob Lawrence's Commission from Fortune to Paint the South." International Review ofAfrican American Art. 19 (2003): 28-36. Hine, Darlene Clark. "Black Migration to the Urban Midwest: The Gender Dimension, 1915-1945." The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class and Gender. Ed. Joe William Trotter Jr. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. 127146. -. "Harriet Ross Tubman." Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia. vol. II. Ed. Darlene Clark Hine. Brooklyn: Carlson Publ. Inc., 1993. 1176-1180. -. "Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 14.4 (Summer 1998): 912-920. Hine, Darlene Clark and Kathleen Thompson. A Shining Thread ofHope: The History of Black Women in America. New York: Broadway Press, 1998. Holland, Juanita Marie. "The Color of African American Artistic Identities in the 20th Century." Narratives of African American Art: The David C. Driskell Collection. Ed. Terry Gips. San Francisco: Pomegranate, 1998. 23-44. Karlstrom, Paul J. "Modernism, Race, and Community." Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence. Eds. Peter T. Nesbett and Michelle DuBois. Seattle: University of Washington Press in association with Jacob Lawrence Catalogue Raisonne Project, 2000. 229-246. King-Hammond, Leslie. "Inside-Outside, Uptown-Downtown: Jacob Lawrence and the Aesthetic Ethos of the Harlem Working-Class Community." Over the Line: The Art and Life ofJacob Lawrence. eds. with an intr. Peter T. Nesbett and Michelle DuBois. Seattle: University of Washington Press in association with Jacob Lawrence Catalogue Raisonne Project, 2000. 67-96. Lawrence, Jacob. The Migration Series. Ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner. Washington, DC: The Rappahannock Press in assoc. with The Phillips Collection, 1993. LeFalie-Coliins, Lizzetta. "The Critical Context of Jacob Lawrence's Early Work." Over the Line: The Art and Life ofJacob Lawrence. Eds. Peter T. Nesbett and Michelle DuBois. Seattle: University of

86

Jutla Gsoels-Lorensen

Washington Press in assoc. with Jacob Lawrence Catalogue Raisonne Project, 2000. 121-146. Lemann, Nicholas. The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. Lorensen, Jutta. "Between Image and Word, Color and Time: Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series." African American Review 40.3 (Fall 2006): 571-586. Louchheim, Aline B. "An Artist Reports on the Troubled Mind." New York Times Magazine. October 15, 1950: 15; 35-6; 38. Moore, Shirley Ann. "Getting There, Being There: African-American Migration to Richmond, California, 1910-1945." The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions ofRace, Class and Gender. Ed. Joe William Trotter Jr. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991. 106-126. Nesbett, Peter T. and Michelle DuBois. Jacob Lawrence. Paintings, Drawings, and Murals (1935-1999). A Catalogue Raisonne. Seattle: University of Washington Press in assoc. with Jacob Lawrence Catalogue R
'Like a Sibylline Creature': The Woman Migrant as Humanist Subject

87

Migration Series. Ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner. Washington, DC: The Rappahannock Press in assoc. with The Phillips Collection, 1993. 155159. Tepfer, Diane. "Edith Gregor Halpert: Impresario of Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series." Jacob Lawrence. The Migration Series. Ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner. Washington, DC: The Rappahannock Press in assoc. with The Phillips Collection, 1993. 129-139. Troller, Joe W. "Migration/Population." Encyclopedia of African American Culture and History. Eds. Jack Salzmann, David Lionel Smith, and Cornel West. New York: Macmillan Library Reference USA, Simon and Schuster Macmillan, 1996. Trotter, Joe W. ed. The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class and Gender. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Turner, Elizabeth Hutton. "Introduction." Jacob Lawrence. The Migration Series. Ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner. Washington, DC: The Rappahannock Press in assoc. with The Phillips Collection, 1993. 1315. Wheat, Ellen Harkins. Jacob Lawrence: American Painter. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press in assoc. with Seattle Art Museum, 1986. - . The Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman Series of 1938-1949. Hampton, VA: Hampton University Museum in assoc. with University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 1991.

Edward Said's Literary Humanism

CHAPTER THREE EDWARD SAID'S LITERARY HUMANISM

R. RADHAKRISHNAN

Is Edward Said just a humanist, pure and simple; or is he a literary humanist? What role do Said's literary-critical expertise and sensibility play in the shaping of his humanistic imagination? What indeed are the differences between Edward Said, the specific practitioner of literary taste and analysis, and the humanist Said who finds in "literature" and "literary style" a point of entry into the worldliness of the world? In which site is Said the "generalist," and critically conscious organic intellectual, and where is he the expert practitioner of a professionally cultivated and sustained erudition? How does Said's "purposelessly purposive" passion for literature tum into the means towards a humanist end? When it comes to thinking through the literature-worldliness nexus, is Said a theoretical thinker or an instrumental interventionist: or would he disallow even such a distinction? My purpose in this brief essay is to examine the many subtle ways in which Said resorts to the ambivalence of literature, i.e., "literature" that is both of the world, and the result of rigorous shaping and generic styling, in his two-pronged recuperation of humanism: from the high theory tout court anti-humanists as well as from the status quo humanists. I begin with an interesting anecdote that Said reports and comments on in the introductory chapter of his book, The World, the Text, and the

Critic. The degree to which the cultural realm and its expertise are institutionally divorced from their real connections with power was wonderfully illustrated for me by an exchange with an old college friend who worked in the Department of Defense for a period during the Vietnam War. The bombings were in full course then, and I was naIvely trying to understand the kind of person who could order daily B-52 strikes over a distant Asian country in the name of the American interest in defending freedom and stopping communism. "You know," my friend said, "the Secretary is a complex human being: he doesn't fit the picture you may have formed of

89

the cold-blooded imperialist murderer. The last time I was in his office I noticed Durrell's Alexandria Quartet on his desk." He paused meaningfully, as if to let Durrell's presence on that desk work its awful power alone. The further implication of my friend's story was that no one who read and presumably appreciated a novel could be the cold-blooded butcher one might suppose him to have been. Many years later this whole implausible anecdote strikes me as typical of what actually obtains: humanists and intellectuals accept the idea that you can read classy fiction as well as kill and maim because the cultural world is available for that particular sort of camouflaging, and because cultural types are not supposed to interfere matters for which the social system has not certified them. What the anecdote illustrates is the approved separation of high-level bureaucrat from the reader of novels of questionable worth and definite status. (2) It is worth analyzing how Said puts this anecdote to work, for it seems to me that the moral of the anecdote is by no means self evident; nor is Said's interpretation the only possible way of looking at it. Before I go any further, I would like to throw into the argument yet another episode, by way of making certain critical connections between the world of books and literature and the worldliness of the world. During that fateful summer of 1982, when Beirut was being brutalized by Israeli attacks, many of us were Said's students for six weeks at the School of Criticism and Theory at Northwestern University. In an informal conversation with a group of us, I don't remember if it was over a cup of coffee or a glass of beer, Said was recounting a bizarre incident in his life. Soon after the publication of Orientalism, he told us, he got a call from a government official in Washington, D.C., that went something like this: "As the author of Orientalism, could you please meet with us and help us understand 'the Arab mind '?" Said was telling us that he did not know whether to cry, laugh, or roar in anger. And remember, the request came from a constituency that had actually read Orientalism: a book whose polemical trajectory is utterly unambiguous and unequivocal. I bring this up to make the point that readers read perspectivally and interestedly, and that there is no natural correlation between what any book is all about and how it will be read and instrurnentalized by any given reader. There is the further point that a functionary of the US Federal government would of course find nothing brutal in bombing "the enemy" in the name of America and its exceptionalist destiny in world history. The Defense Secretary could easily have been an ardent Ralph Waldo Emerson enthusiast; and it would still not be a contradiction for the simple reason that a dogmatic valorization of nationalist self goes hand in hand with the killing and the maiming and the slaughtering of the "other."

R. Radhakrishnan

Edward Said's Literary Humanism

The example of Said's Orientalism and the Federal government official is particularly perverse and irrational: but it is not really unintelligible within the larger macropolitical context of American exceptionalism and imperialism. To transfer this argument to the instance of Durrell's book on the Secretary's desk: it is not possible to generate a normative expectation from the mere phenomenal presence of the book on the desk. (I will not get into the themes of the Alexandria Quartet and the exoticizing that goes on in those pages: in other words the ways in which that quartet could easily be read as "Orientalist" in orientation and disposition). Said, it seems to me, is raising two kinds of question at the same time: one theoretical, and the other, pedagogical. The theoretical task is to respect the relative internal autonomy of literature as a genre and a particular mode of aesthetic making, and the pedagogical objective is to "teach in" to the study of literature a definitive and binding relationship to the world outside, i.e., the real world to which the "world" ofliterature is a particular mode of address. Said is asking, in other words, for a "contrapuntal" reading of literature and cultural texts: i.e., a reading that will acknowledge the complicity of Culture in matters of Empire and political power without at the same reducing the aesthetic to the political. If as Walter Benjamin would have it, every document of civilization is equally a document of barbarism, the response then is not to avoid the study of these documents, but to study them in a symptomatic, guilty, and complicit mode. The question I will bring up later on in the essay, in the context of Said's valorization of literature, is: how is literary or aesthetic complicity different from other forms of complicity? Or, to put it differently, is literature the kind of complicity out of which can emerge a critique, by way of aesthetic form and self-reflexivity? There is also the issue of what counts or should count as "literature." Even though Said does not expand on this, he does find the time towards the very end of the passage to take a well aimed side-swipe at the quality of Alexandria Quartet in the following phrase, "novels of questionable worth and definite status." In other words, given time and opportunity, Said would like to disabuse his friend on another level as well: that of the purely literary and the aesthetic. He would teach his friend that the Durrell text, despite its status, is indeed of "questionable worth," and that it does not deserve the canonization that it has been accorded. So, who is responsible for the divorce of the cultural realm from questions of power? The passage ~uoted above points the finger quite steadily: humanists and intellectuals. These are the folks who have set up the kind of "camouflaging" whereby literature is always already exonerated from its real, and often brutal, implication in the real world of

power, empire,. dominance, exploitation, suffering, and ~ubju?ation. If humanists and mtellectuals, and here SaId would have m mmd those professional,. meritocratic an~ narcissistically "discursive" intellectuals who in their expert capacll1es have exempted themselves from the problems of the world, are. to bl~e, what the~ of '''humanis~'' as a hislOrico-pohllcal, cultural-IdeologIcal and eplstemlc domam that generates these humanists? As I have argued elsewhere, Said, unlike Michel Foucault, takes great care to make a distinction between humanism as a theoretical and discursive a priori, and humanists who are active and agential practitioners of humanism. 2 For it is Said's belief that the same humanists who have erred can be taught to be better humanists: the fault is not with humanism per se, or humanism as theory tout court, but rather with the specific historical ways in which humanism has been used to betray its real promise. Said does not believe that humanism, despite its objectionable track record, functions as a totalized and totalizing ideological a priori that interpellates the humanist intellectual choicelessly. Here is Said's succinct diagnosis of the humanist predicament:

90

91

1 believed then, and still believe, that it is possible to be critical of humanism in the name of humanism and that, schooled in its abuses by the experience of Eurocentrism and empire, one could fashion a different kind of humanism that was cosmopolitan and text-and-Ianguage-bound in ways that absorbed the great lessons of the past from, say, Eric Auerbach and Leo Spitzer and more recently from Richard Poirier, and still remain attuned to the emergent voices and currents of the present, many of them exilic, extraterritorial, and unhoused, as well as uniquely American. (Humanism 10-11; my emphasis) I must confess that my response to a passage like this, and the book abounds with such passages, is truly ambivalent: on the one hand, I respect the clarity of intention that shines through the language, but on the other hand, I am troubled and disappointed by a certain short-handedness in the mode of argumentation. It reads me to me as though that Said, having decided what his beliefs and intentions are, is really not interested in demonstrating how these beliefs and intentions are defensible historically as well as theoretically. This is just another way of saying that Said ends up paying a price for his political transparency, lack of sustained argumentation and definitional clarity. I am quite amazed by the ease that characterizes Said's claim that "it is possible to be critical of humanism" In the name of humanism. Is this a proleptic gesture, an empirical claim, a counter-empirical claim, a theoretical guarantee? What does "belief' mean In the context of the received histories of humanism? (It must also be

92

R. Radhakrishnan

stated here that the harsh critics of humanism are not just high theorists, but also a range of subaltern constituencies including critical race theorists, leaders of the "new nigger" movement, and others who are not interested in any kind of critical-remedial relationship with humanism even if it is prepared to learn from such egregious and costly blunders such as Colonialism and Eurocentrism). I realize that what drives Said's rhetoric is that very imperative that Said valued so much in Raymond Williams: search for alternatives, and resources of hope. But "in the name of what" are these to be realized?3 ~ And here, where Said is looking to anchor his political and worldly agency, is exactly where Said's rhetoric demonstrates its vulnerability. The onus, a burden that Said will not accept, is on Said to prove that the very category of "in the name oP' that he invokes in the spirit of benign progress is not the very category "in the name of' which were perpetrated a whole series of atrocities: ethnocentrism, eurocentrism, colonialism, etc. 4 My "theoretical suggestion" is that it is imperative that the problem of "in the name of' be given the importance that it deserves. The abuses that were committed in the name of humanism, contrary to Said, I would argue were very much in the spirit of humanism: the abuses are a form of compliance in the "essentialism of humanism," its anchorage in the a priori of the dominant discourse of the "West." To illustrate with a quick example, let us consider the longue duree of American foreign policy. Let us assume that "America" is prepared to school itself through its errors and blunders. I submit that there are two kinds of schooling that are possible: one superficial, and the other real. The superficial fix, to put it briefly but defmitively, would happen without in any way calling into question the fundamental axiology of American exceptionalism. s (Who can deny that American exceptionalism has done some good as well, the world over, and who can deny that America has been the haven for immigrants from all over the globe?) The real learning will happen only when the USA is prepared to deal with itself and the rest of the world "in the name oP' an ideology/epistemology that has nothing to do with American exceptionalism. Any schooling that occurs within the regime of American exceptionalism is nothing but pseudo-schooling. It could be argued that the history of humanism is nothing like the sorry narrative of American exceptionalism; but I would immediately counter-argue, "Look at the victims of western humanism all over the world." There is no gainsaying the fact a) that humanism is a very specific ideological "ism" that masquerades as a trans-ideological human and humane universalist vision, and b) that humanism by its very nature is a canonical formation that disallows possibilities of a heterogeneous critique, and c) that humanism

Edward Said's Literary Humanism

93

has already predetermined and pre-read the human problemati1ue without a genealogical analysis of the construct known as "the human.' "A different kind of humanism," according to Said, and "towards a neW humanism," according to Frantz Fanon. So, what will it take to usher in that newness, that radical difference?? What would be the nature as well as the positionality of the critique that would make possible the emergence of this difference, this newness?8 Here again, it is important to keep in mind that what Said has in mind is the critic and critical consciousness, and not "critique" in the theoretical sense of the term: more of this at a subsequent part of the essay where I will be analyzing Said's relationship to Adorno, particularly as it comes out in Said's latest posthumously published book, Late Style. Why is it that Said, whose temperament and critical sensibility are always on the side of the exilic, the borderly, and the liminal, chooses to locate critical activity within the body proper of humanism, rather than situate it without?9 Why is it that Said, who has no taste for being a card-carrying "ist" of any sort, has no problem being a humanist? Is it because, to Said, humanism is really not an ism at all? The term "oppositional" that has a crucially constitutive valence in Said's vocabulary suddenly disappears in the context of humanism which has been provocation enough to warrant oppositional consciousness. The answer perhaps lies in Said's solicitude for continuity and the longue duree of humanism as well as for a useable past. Whereas theoretical "breaks" focus on paradigmatic discontinuity, Said's historical vision is interested in making creative connections among Spitzer, Auerbach, and Richard Poirier who is after all Said's own contemporary. He needs a continuous macropolitical horizon that will enable the making of certain progressive connections: connections that will eventually result in the formation of a canon, i.e., a good and inclusive canon. Said is not really interested in the questioning of canonicity as such: that would be a meta-critical, second order theoretical project that would seem quite redundant to Said. It is in the fashioning of "the good" and the avoidance of "the bad" that motivates Said's critical consciousness, and not the "theoretical" project of understanding and dealing with the harsh underlying reality that "the good" and "the bad" are simultaneously but differentially subtended by the systemic logic of binarity. It is not at all surprising that to Said such a differently fashioned humanism would be cOsmopolitan and text-and-language bound. In answer to the question, "What kind of humanism," Said would say: cosmopolitan humanism of course. But the question has to arise, despite Said's unwavering confidence, how many humanisms are there, and how is a cosmopolitan humanism better than and superior to those other humanisms? What

94

R. Radhakrishnan

besides is the ideological relationship between cosmopolitanism and humanism? Are they perfectly coordinated instantiations of each otber, or, is cosmopolitanism the most advanced, the fairest, and the most just and equitable incarnation of a bumanism in the making? Wbat Said's sometimes merely descriptive and at other times hortatory discourse conceals is the reality tbat cosmopolitanism and bumanism are not synonymous. Wbat is clear, given the overall tbrust of Said's oeuvre is tbat cosmopolitanism to Said, as Bruce Robbins has pointed out persuasively, is antagonistic to tbe identity politics of nationalism. lo Thougb that clarification helps situate tbe valence of cosmopolitanism with some precision, it still does not explain the ideological leap from cosmopolitanism to the unmarked plenitude of bumanism. So mucb indeed bas been written about home and not home, exile and belonging, the world and the home, in Said's work, and I do not intend to rebearse tbose profound discussions. I I My purpose bere is more limited. I merely want to understand bow the cosmopolitan mode of belonging as not belonging is profoundly literary in Said's discourse. 12 It is not at all coincidental that as be unpacks the term "cosmopolitan," Said instantly turns to language and text. Both language and text work for Said as tbe very instruments tbat are required for the worlding of tbe world. Identity politics are destabilized, borders are brought down and transcended, petty fiefdoms of exclusionary belonging are repudiated, and contradictions are resolved within an inclusive contrapuntal structuration: all of this is possible in a language and text bound humanism tbat allows the lessons of the past to be available to the present within the continuity of a tradition. Not unlike a Matthew Arnold or a T.S. Eliot, or a Hans-Georg Gadamer, Said too is interested in fashioning a seamless tradition, i.e., not seamless in a given sort of way, but constructed as seamless from the interests of a certain perspective. In a move that is so characteristic of his late work, Said performs a balancing or an equilibrating act: receiving tbe good lessons from the past within a continuous horizon and still be receptive to a whole range of emergent and heterogeneous voices that include the exilic, tbe extraterritorial, as well as the uniquely American. As I have attempted to show elsewhere,J3 it is a certain aestheticizing 14 of the political that enables to reconcile real ideological oppositions contrapuntally: for after all, despite their counter-energies, both tbe point and the counter-point are, and need to be part of the same musical text. Said literally wants to leave nothing out, within the generosity of his humanistic imagination. IS Leaving aside the quaint indeterminacy of "the uniquely American," it is difficult to imagine how in a world where globalization also means tbe erecting of a wall between the USA and

Edward Said's Literary Humanism

95

Mexico and not between the USA and Canada, tbese different realities will not only coexist peacefully and symbiotically, but will also consent to be territorialized witbin the spatiality of humanism. Would Said then be in agreement witb the famous T.S. Eliot pronouncement in tbe essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" that when a new work enters the room of Tradition, all existing works within the room shuffle around, experience a struclUIal adjustment so as to allow the new work in terms of the tradition so that that very same tradition may renew and reconstitute itself? I sincerely hope not. For the question that T.S. Eliot does not ask is: Whose tradition? Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands, and other such texts of which there are many, may not want to be part of a "good" tradition, leave alone be an assimilated contributor to such a "good" tradition. Such a constantly self-renovating tradition has no time or space to acknowledge antagonisms that cannot be squared off within the "educable givens" of the tradition: i.e., antagonisms that call into question the very being of the receiving tradition. To pose the question in terms already invoked by Said, what is the relationship of the cosmopolitan to the uniquely American? If the cosmopolitan imagination is necessarily anti- and/or post-national, then how does it accommodate the American, unique or otherwise, within its fold? Is America here a mere literary trope and not an actual nation? Said does give us an answer and that answer is profoundly literary. The cosmopolitan reality is text and language bound. It is in the domain of Ii lerature and aesthetics that the cosmopolitan worldview is realized as an ideal order that can harmoniously collocate the best of the old and the emerging new voices, the housed and the unhoused, the national and the exilic, and so on. Cosmopolitanism is aesthetic/literary humanism at its subtle best. What Said does to ensure that such a humanism is not just given or idealized as a beautiful/ait accompli, is to introduce the complex historicity of the reader and her ability to read the text in all its multilayered complexity. Here is Said describing himself and the nature of his critical performance: Let me interrupt my argument here to go to the question of aesthetics, since as someone whose intellectual life has been dedicated largely to the understanding and teaching of great works of literary and musical art, as well as to a career of social and political engagement and commitmentthe two separately from each other-I have found that the quality of what one reads is often as important as how and why one reads in the first place. (Humanism 62; my emphasis) Said goes on to "agree with Adorno that there is a fundamental Irreconcilability between the aesthetic and the nonaesthetic that we must

96

R. Radhakrishnan

sustain as a necessary condition of our work as humanists" (63). "For we must," Said argues, "I think, assume that there is always the supervening reality of the aesthetic work without which the kind of humanism I 'am talking about here really has no essential meaning, only an instrumental one" (64). I would like to assemble one more passage from Said to help me analyze the profoundly contradictory and symptomatic ways in which "humanism," motored by the literary and aesthetic imagination, and "essentialism" address each other in Said's critical practice. Says Said: Ifwe agree that essentialism is assailable, indeed profoundly vulnerable on epistemological grounds, then why does it nonetheless persist at the heart of humanism, where cultural pride of an extraordinarily uninteresting variety takes over when the labels and claims begin to seem untenable or simply false? When will we stop allowing ourselves to think of humanism as a fonn of smugness and not as an unsettling adventure in difference, in alternative traditions, in texts that need a new deciphering within a much wider context than has hitherto been given them? It therefore seems to me that we must begin to rid ourselves, consciously and resolutely, of the whole complex of attitudes associated not just with Eurocentrism but with identity itself, which can no longer be tolerated in humanism as easily as it was before and during the Cold War. Taking their cue from the literature, thought, and art of our time, humanists must recognize with some alann that the politics of identity and the nationalistically grounded system of education remain at the core of what most of us actually do, despite changed boundaries and objects of research. (Humanism 54-55)

This is terrific stuff: intense, passionate, hortatory, and critically utopian in the best sense of the term; and I am entirely in support of Said's macropolitical vision. But where I have difficulty is with the modality of his argumentation and with his theoretical, or intentionally non-theoretical or perhaps anti-theoretical orientation. Let me begin with a reiteration: that in Said's universe, literature is the pedagogical voice of authority, inspiration, and leadership that makes humanism available as the hitherto "unthought" potential of and for the future. In this he is not alone: Foucault and Derrida, and a number of writers entertain precisely this hope. Perhaps we could include, in a way that would make Said happy, Sir Philip Sydney in this list. 16 So, in this passage is Said just "speaking," or is he "speaking for?" Is this expressive discourse, or is it representative and representational as well? I raise this on a double register: one with reference to Said's superb and subtle sensibility as a public intellectual who is also an exquisitely nuanced reader of aesthetic and literary texts, and the other with reference

Edward Said's Literary Humanism

97

to the genre known as "literature." As for Said, as he makes it clear when

he maintains the discreteness of the aesthetic from the nonaesthetic, that he is a singular intellectual-individual who despite his unequivocal political partisanship and commitment, will not easily be spoken for by the logic of collectivity. His belonging at best is exilic, ek-static. He may well indulge in "representations of the intellectual," but by impulse and inclination he is not a gung-ho representative thinker. His advocacy of representation has a strategic, and not theoretical, valence in a world that is structured in dominance: in a world where every group can represent itself hegemonically, but not the Palestinians. Even here, as he has demonstrated in one memorable essay after another, particularly in the piece, "Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims," he will not succumb, in the name of political opportunism, to the seductions of identity politics or the blandishments of nationalistic interpellation and sovereignty.17 This impulse not to be preempted by the urgencies of representation is a crucial characteristic of literature which too, in the noblest sense of the term, is also post-representational. It is the literary expert in Said who has the foresight that protectionist and identitarian deployments of representation, despite their short-term benefits and results, are indeed in the long run ruinous to human possibilities. To revert now to my earlier question: is Said an instrumental thinker, and correspondingly, is humanism an instrumental mode of thinking? If the opposition were between theory as unworldly and autotelic, and humanism as worldly and agential, then I would assume that Said would come down on the side of humanism as the means to an end. But what we find is quite the opposite: because his brand of humanism is aesthetics and literature inspired, Said seeks a way to differentiate a "merely instrumental" humanism from an "essential" humanism. In other words, Said has to fwd a way to serve two masters: an end oriented and practical humanism, and the realm of the aesthetic that can enjoy its non-utile autonomy. It is not at all coincidental that the adjective that Said uses to differentiate a truly valuable humanism, i.e., one informed and constituted by the aesthetic imperative from a merely instrumental version is "essentiaL" What does Said in this context mean by "essential"? There are several antithetical and antonymous words to "essential": non-essential, accidental, existential, adventitious, opportunistic, strategic, contingent, fortuitous, gratuitous, serendipitous, formal, circumstantial, external, material, methodological, a posteriori, superficial, and so on. It would all depend on which register or in which vocabulary one locates "essentiaL" But one thing is obvious. He certainly has in mind the category of aesthetic necessity (more of this in a later section where I will be

R. Radhakrishnan

Edward Said's Literary Humanism

discussing Said's "elective affinity" with Adorno, despite Adorno's rebarbative language): he has in mind a humanism that is valuable by virtue of itself, and not because it is merely an instrument towards a goal. In this sense, Said's valorization of literature is analogous to the Adornian and the Frankfurt School's critique of instrumental reason. Literature is, to Said, the critique with a human, individual consciousness-and-agency. What is not clear is why that anti-instrumental stance should automatically entail an advocacy of the "essential." There are some very real contradictions in Said's argumentative rationale that warrant clos
and the humanism that dares to think differently, now that it has been liberated from the stranglehold of essentialism. To Said, not all of humanism is categorically and theoretically subsumed by essentialism: it is rather humanism against itself. To Said's anguished and impassioned question, "why then does essentialism continue to live in the heart of humanism?" the poststructuralist would respond thus: the heart of essentialism and the heart of humanism are one and the same. It is indeed something called "human-ness" that becomes the historical vehicle for the allegorical tenor, i.e., "the essence of essence." Whereas a Foucault, contrary to Noam Chomsky, would maintain that the argument is not over "good," or "bad," but rather about the genealogy of the human. To Foucault, and I would strongly agree with Foucault, "The human being is essentially good" is as epistemologically invalid and refutable as "The human being is essentially bad or evil." The simple fact of the matter, to Foucault, is that nothing essentially is, or can be. In this limited sense alone, Foucault and Sartre, whatever their other fundamental differences, find themselves on the same team; whereas to Said, with his univocal commitment to praxis, it is okay for a good humanism to make essential claims about the human. Said has no problem short-circuiting epistemology so that he can continue with his useful praxis. The predicament of historical humanism as an instantiation of the ontology of essentialism, to Said, is neither a fact nor a theoretical disposition. It is more a matter of belief and wishing and wanting and intending. As he puts it, "When will we stop allowing ourselves to think of humanism as a form of smugness and not as an unsettling adventure in difference... ?" (HI/manism 55). His rhetoric makes it seem that if we wished hard enough and sincerely enough, we can wrest humanism away from essentialism. But as I have tried to prove already, there is a part of Said that wants to hold on essentially to something called "human nature." Let us take for example the famous conversation between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky on Dutch TV about "what is to be done," and the nature of the human. 18 I would like to say parenthetically that it was my privilege and pleasure to have been introduced to this conversation, along with such other colleagues and friends such as Steve Mailloux, David Lloyd, and Donald Pease, by none other than Edward Said himself who had incorporated this text into our syllabus for the summer course in Critical Theory at Northwestern University, 1982. In that discussion, Foucault and Chomsky are in perfect alignment when it comes to defining what political struggle is and should be all about (I am reminded here of that earlier and an equally likely collaboration between Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre in the context of American war crimes in Vietnam),

98

99

R. Radhakrishnan

Edward Said's Literary Humanism

but they part company radically when the agenda moves to definitions of the human. Here, Chomsky is quite contented to posit the human, and along with it, concepts such as Freedom and Justice, as a priori categories, but Foucault the genealogist will have none of it. To him, the human is not a given: it has to be envisioned as a groundless and the very history of Reason has to be understood as unreasonable. Said, as he was presenting this text to us, made it very clear whose side he was on. Quite predictably, despite his very real appreciation for Foucault, he was decidedly proChomsky. _ Said, like his distinguished friend and admirer, Chomsky, has the need to secure the truth of the political in a trans-political epistemology: in other words, Said will not be a party to the radical dismantling of the human into the "human.,,19 Although Said is insistently rigorous in defining the secular as nothing but historical through and through, when it comes to differentiating between subject formation and agency formation, Said chooses to elevate agency to a higher categorical level in the name of the essentially human. This perhaps is why he does not find the poststructuralist tout court dismissal of humanism either defensible or useful. From his perspective, such a dismissal is symptomatic of a desire to hierarchize the relationship between epistemology and politics, in favor of the former. Having declared his overall approval of the epistemological unfounding of essentialism, Said would rather focus his attention on combating essentialism through what he understands as praxis. I am reminded here of the way in which Raymond Williams, much admired by Said, applauds Said's critical intervention. I am thinking here of Williams's eloquent blurb for Said's book, The World, the Text, and the Critic: "It is a pleasure to read someone who not only has studied and thought so carefully but is also beginning to substantiate, as distinct from announcing (my emphasis), a genuinely emergent way of thinking.,,2o Both to Williams and to Said, theory, with its insistence on the coupure (the "break") and the temporality thereof, is a never-ending announcement, a meta-level performance that never gets to "substantiating" itself historically and agentially. This objective of achieving worldly intentionality and agency is mediated, in Said's thinking, through a critique of professionalism. Humanism may well be a specialist activity worthwhile on its own terms, but the "humane-ness" and the humanity that humanism is all about is an essential, organic, and general reality. Said's criticism of theory and Said's criticism of professionalism have to be seen as mutually coordinated. It is in the context of resisting the elitism of an exclusively academic-specialist paradigm of knowledge that Said understands humanism as a possibility

for alternatives and the perennial widening of human possibilities. Let us hear Said on this theme:

100

101

But there can be no doubt that for me humanism as a worldly practice can move beyond and inhabit more than just the original privacy of the writer or the relatively private space of the classroom or inner sanctum, both of which are inevitably necessary to what we want to do as humanists. Education involves widening circles of awareness, each of which is distinct analytically while being connected to the others by virtue of worldly reality. A reader is in a place, in a school or university, in a work place, or in a specific country at a particular time, situation, and so forth. But these are not passive frameworks. In the process of widening the humanistic horizon, its achievements of insight and understanding, the framework must be actively understood, constructed, and interpreted. And this is what the resistance is: the ability to differentiate between what is directly given and what may be withheld, whether because one's own circumstances as a humanistic specialist may confine one to a limited space beyond which one can't venture or because one is indoctrinated to recognize only what one has been educated to see or because only policy experts are presumed to be entitled to speak about the economy, health services, or foreign and military policies, issues of urgent concern to the humanist as a citizen. Does one accept the prevailing horizons and confinements, or does one try as a humanist to challenge them? (Humanism 75-76) One can see how Said interbraids the creative energies with democratic possibilities. Interested both in the essential goodness and desirability of humanism and in humanism as pedagogy, Said tries all he can to sustain his commitment to the literary and aesthetic complexities, and at the same time insist on the access to all of the beauties and harmonies of humanistic scholarship: a conjunctural imperative well illustrated by the cover design of Humanism and Democratic Criticism: the ticket stub "Admit All" protruding from the pages of a ponderous book and its esoteric interiority.21 It is this inclusive, non-discriminating and resistant macropolitical vision that allows Said, on the basis of his humanistic expertise, to imagine life and living as a continuum linking the organic with the specific, the specialist with the general/lay, "all of it occurring in the world, on the ground of daily life and history and hopes, and the search for knowledge and justice, and then perhaps also for liberation" (Humanism 83). Let us see now how Said puts such a vision to work through worldly, perspectival reading practices: practices that interestingly take Said back to authors like Conrad who are very much part of Eurocentrism and its Contradictory legacy to the world. Is Said's compulsive return to Conrad

R. Radhakrishnan

Edward Said's Literary Humanism

and his narratological complexity aesthetic, or worldly, or both, or the one because of the other? This brief analysis will also help us understand how "literature" functions in Said's critical discourse both as a general possibility and as a generic economy. 22 I would now like to juxtapose two passages from Said, the first from Humanism and Democratic Criticism, and the second from Freud and the Non-European:

literary style that Said accords to Conrad's vision the radical capacity to anticipate, in the mode of the future anterior, its own antithesis in the future. It is made to seem as though Conrad's essentializing of African realities is the necessary precondition for the emergence of Africa in all its historical heterogeneity. In other words, it is because it is a literary text that Conrad's work can both be itself and its own antinomian futural possibility. Conrad's limitations and guilt as an individual are laundered by Conrad's literary style. The uncompromising Eurocentric vision is instantly transformed into its own antinomian possibility, and real antagonisms are rendered merely contrapuntal within the figurality of the great work of literature. It is the power of language that makes it all possible. Said is quite clear about this as is evident in the following appreciation.

102

Thus to read an author like Conrad, for example, is first of all to read his work as if with the eye of Conrad himself, which is to try to understand each word, each metaphor, each sentence as something consciously chosen by Conrad in preference to any number of other possibilities. We know of course from looking at the manuscripts of his works how laborious and how time-consuming that process of composition and choice was for him: it therefore behooves us as his readers to make a comparable effort by getting inside his language so to speak, inside it so as to understand why he put it that way in particular, to understand it as it was made. (62) And now, the other passage: The horribly' attenuated and oppressed black porters and savages that Conrad portrays in terms that Achebe finds so objectionable not only contain within them the frozen essence that condemns them to the servitude and punishment Conrad sees as their present fate, but also point prophetically towards a whole series of implied developments that their later history discloses despite, over and above, and also paradoxically because of, the radical severity and awful solitude of Conrad's essentializing vision. The fact that later writers keep returning to Conrad means that his work, by virtue of its uncompromising Eurocentric vision, is precisely what gives it its antinomian force, the intensity and power wrapped inside its sentences, which demand an equal and opposite response to meet them head on in a confirmation, a refutation, or an elaboration of what they present. (25-26) It is easy to follow Said's humanist maneuvers as he transcodes the laborious act of reading into one of empathy. In insisting that the reader put in a comparable effort, he is in fact de-textualizing the text so that a humane and inter-subjective meeting of minds may take place between reader and writer?) There is also the characteristic emphasis on how to pry open the text to get at the technique of the author's intentionality. He is in fact humanizing and in a sense condoning the text. The rationale of the passage from Freud and the Non-European is strange, and honestly, difficult to comprehend. In a reading of perverse and misdirected generosity, Said makes Conrad's essentializing vision the deconstructive begetter of its own antagonism. It is in the name of Conrad's virtuosic

103

And of course in Conrad, as with all extraordinary minds, the felt tension between what is intolerably there and a symmetrical compulsion to escape from it is what is most profoundly at stake--what the reading and interpretation of a work like Heart ofDarkness is all about. Texts that are inertly of their time stay there: those which brush up unstintingly against historical constraints are the ones we keep with us, generation after generation. (Freud 26-27) Said is making an extremely important distinction here, and I agree with him rather than with Chinua Achebe, between texts that "inertly" receive and reproduce the received terms of their contemporaneity, and those that occupy their given contemporaneity rebelliously, "against the grain." I would say that this acknowledgment is necessary, lest any virtuous and politically correct text be carried away by its own piety and thereby be blinded to the Janus-faced nature of even the purest of revolutions. Every manifesto of goodness, as we well know, is constituted by what that "goodness" necessarily excludes and others. What strikes me as odd and paradoxical is the coupling of "uncompromising" and "Eurocentrism" as a positive collocation. As we think of other comparable phrases such as, "uncompromising racisrn/sexism/homophobialpatriarchy," the paradox looms larger. The "uncompromising" in the latter cases is hardly flattering: it is indeed deplorable. So, 'what is the real, i.e., historical as well as epistemological/theoretical, difference between Eurocentrism and by extension "centrism as such" and orientations such as racism, sexism, patriarchy, and homophobia? Could Said be claiming that centrism as such is really unavoidable, whereas the other instances are instances of intentional, volitional deployment? To that one could respond, in

R. Radhakrishnan

Edward Said's Literary Humanism

alignment with Jacques Derrida, that there is a constitutive-symptomatic connection between the two, with the more obvious violations being the surface manifestation of a deeper structural malady, i.e., centrism. What Said is getting at implicitly is the problem of self and other. He is suggesting that indeed an other-oriented or centered thinking is just plain impossible since the human cogito is not hardwired to perform such a task. It is ineluctable that all thinking is self-interested and perspectival to start with, but one can build organically into such a perspective a deconstructive and autocritical imperative such that the self-centrist elaboration-is instantly relativized and "relationalized" with reference to other selfcentrisms that are out there in the world. It is precisely on the basis of such a strong presupposition that Said, unlike Chinua Achebe, devotes so much time in appreciating "the staging of narrative" in Conrad and the generation of antinomian possibilities within a dominant narratology that is being forced to acknowledge its ethico-political bankruptcy as well as cruelty. It is the relationship between the possibilities for contrapuntal reading and the latency of "antinomian force" that is problematic in Said's account of how. the Comad text works, despite itself. Could Said be seen as recreating the debate between Foucault and Derrida over the Cartesian text, and furthermore, could Said be construed as partisan to the Derridean reading that complex texts have built into them a potential for self deconstruction?24 Clearly, Said is not exonerating all Eurocentric texts and crediting them carte blanche with the prowess to generate from the core of their uncompromising centrism an antinomian possibility and future. It is the work of language in Conrad that sets him apart from lesser writers and makes a different case for Comad's culpability and complicity in Eurocentrism. I would also say, and I deal with this in detail elsewhere, that it is Edward Said's "double-conscious" relationship with the West that produces this compulsion both to honor the humanism in Eurocentrism, and not to excuse the Eurocentrism that undergirds humanism. It is in the same spirit that Said defends Freud's centrism:

If one were to extrapolate, Said is suggesting that Freud cannot know what he could not have known, and to hold him accountable to what he did not knOW what he could not have known would just not be fair. It is in the light of this rationale that Freud's Eurocentrism is justifiable. But clearly freud knew of colonization, of Asia and Africa, and of the regnant power relationships between Europe and its "others." Moreover, isn't it the hallmark of great thinkers to be ahead of their contemporaneity, and to create new knowledges "against the grain," a claim that Said does make in defense of Conrad's Heart ofDarkness? After all, where is the virtue and where is the merit in Freud responding to the truths of decolonization after decolonization? What I find bothersome in Said's formulation, a fonnulation that is elaborated in greater detail in Said's Culture and imperialism. is the privileging of the metropolitan site, even in the context of decolonization. The ex-colonized peoples, in Said's account, make their historical presence felt only when they migrate to the heart of the metropolis. 25 Clearly, given the thrust of his general work, Said cannot really mean this. So, what is motivating such a hasty judgment? I think it is because there is much else happening in Freud's work that is progressive, revolutionary, and transformative. Even as he is prepared to use the term "Eurocentric" descriptively, and not critically or judgmentally, Said takes great pain to demonstrate Freud's concern for the non-European, in the case of Moses:

104

In any event, I believe it is true to say that Freud's view was a Eurocentric view of culture-and why should il not be? His world had not yet been touched by the globalization, or rapid travel, or decolonization, that were to make many formerly unknown or repressed cultures available to metropolitan Europe. He lived just before the massive population shifts that were to bring Indians, Africans, West Indians, Turks and Kurds into the heart of Europe as guest-workers, and often unwelcome immigrants. (Freud 16; my emphasis)

105

What I find so compelling about it is that Freud seems to have made a special effort never to discount or play down the fact that Moses was nonEuropean especially since, in the terms of his argument, modem Judaism and the Jews were mainly to be thought of as European, or at least as belonging to Europe rather than Asia or Africa. (Freud 50) And he follows this up with this brilliant apercu: From an instrumental point of view, Moses had to be a non-European so that in murdering him the Israelites would have something to repress, and also something to recall, elevate and spiritualize during the course of their great adventure in the rebuilding oflsrael overseas. (51) One can see how Said works the insides and the outsides of Freud's belonging and constituency. He admires Freud for not succumbing to the temptation of Europeanizing Judaism, for keeping non-European difference alive within Eurocentrism. And yet, despite this rigor, Said tells LIS that Freud's Judaism "was condemned to remember what it could not easily forget, but that it pressed on with making Israel stronger and more

R. Radhakrishnan

Edward Said's Literary Humanism

powerful none the less" (51-52). What Said finds fascinating in Freud's intervention is its inherently contradictory nature: that a form of appeasable guilt contributes to the empowerment of an Israeli nationalism which in due time will unhouse and torment Palestinians. In other words, Freud's discourse works like literature: contrapuntal, and at odds with itself in ways that are productive of times to come. In other words, the literary condition is that which partakes of the historical condition in ~ double way: remaining symptomatic of it even as it resists totalization by the regime of the symptom. The important ethico-political lesson to be learned here that what Freud achieves progressively in one site or context can be made to travel to another troubled context where Freud himself, for reasons of historical determination, could not intervene in a revolutionary mode. As he considers different practitioners, defenders, and critics of a failed and flawed humanism, Said has something provocative to say about Frantz Fanon, who more than Freud or Conrad had substantive reasons to hate and abominate humanism for very specific political reasons that refuse philosophical or aesthetic-literary solace.

This is both a useful and an idiosyncratically unfair reading of Fanon, particularly, the registering of dissatisfaction with the fact that Fanon has not offered humanity a revolutionary blueprint. If Said, fifty years after the momentous decades of decolonization, cannot offer us an answer, it is hardly fair to expect Fanon who is writing in and during and through Colonialism to articulate a programmatic answer and solution. Not just that: what I find disturbing is that the intensity that animates Said's endorsement of Freud far outshines the intensity of his horror and indignation at the murder of Man by Europe that Fanon is disclosing with such political passion. All Said can point out is that Fanon himself is interpellated by the very system and discourse that he is rebuking and anathematizing. What is disappointing is that Said fails to give enough attention to Fanon's tout court rejection of humanism as a system, regimen, and episteme. 26 Humane-the human-humanism: we can see how Said is attempting to weave into continuity the different stranded aspects of our common human possibility. The wavelength that tunes the different broadcasts and synchronizes them all, despite the relative autonomies of the ethical, the political, the epistemologicaVtheoretical, the aesthetic, the individual, the collective, the specialist, the lay generalist and organic, is that of critical utopianism. Said's endeavor to do justice to all the "bad" that has been perpetrated in the name of humanism, and all the "good" that can still be imagined and achieved in the name of humanism is nothing short of heroic. It is no surprise then that Said turns to literature as a potential spokesperson of that other future that is being occluded, aborted, by forces of division, hatred, and identitarian protectionism. Foucault too looks to literature with a similar longing. As I bring this essay towards a conclusion, I would like to consider briefly the ways in which the human, the death-bound human,27 is traced with a love tinged with recalcitrant irony in Said's late and posthumous work, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, a work that weaves the posthumous condition into the living present in the name of an unappeasable, and as Said would have it, "irascible" contingency, more lasting than permanence and necessity. Stathis Gourgouris, in an aptly entitled essay, "Transformation, not Transcendence" captures the salience of Said's thought thus:

106

The point for Fanon, though, is that when you extend not just Freud, but all the scientific achievements of European science, into the practice of colonialism, Europe ceases to occupy a normative position with regard to the native. Hence Fanon proclaims: "leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the comer of every one of their own streets, in all the comers of the globe.... Europe undertook the leadership of the world with ardor, cynicism, and violence. Look at how the shadow of her palaces stretches out ever further! Every one of her movements has burst the bounds of space and thought. Europe has declined all humility and all modesty; but she has also set her face against all solicitude and tenderness ....When I search for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders." Not surprisingly, then, and even though his prose and some of his reasoning depend on it, Fanon rejects the European model entirely, and demands instead that all human beings collaborate together in the invention of new ways to create what he calls "the new man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth." Fanon himself scarcely provides his readers with anything like a blueprint for the new ways he has in mind; his main purpose, however, is to indict Europe for having divided human beings into a hierarchy of races that reduced and dehumanized the subordinates to both the scientific gaze and the will of the superiors.

(Freud 20-21)

The strength of Freud's thought, Said argues, "can be articulated in and speak to other besieged identities as well, not through dispensing palliatives such as tolerance and compassion, but rather by attending to it as a troubling, disabling, destabilizing secular wound, the essence of the cosmopolitan, from which there can be no recovery, no state of resolved or

107

108

Edward Said's Literary Humanism

R. Radhakri shnan stoic calm, and no utopian re-conciliation even within itself." Only a critical secular response that attends to this "wound"-that realizes the limitations of history and yet realizes the limitless capacity of the historicalimagination-would cast its eye upon the future without becoming enchanted by its conjured irrelevance, apocalyptic abolition, utopian promise, or transcendence. It is this transgressive, transformative desire to resist the will to transcendence that animates Said's conviction that "all criticism is postulated and performed on the assumption that it is to have a ~ future." The conviction of having a future against all odds is this paradoxical affirmation of our historical being that emerges out of the _ acceptance of our existential finitude. Disappointingly, this is becoming more and more rare in our historical present. (78-79)

The distinction that Gourgouris makes between transgression and transcendence is quite crucial: whereas transcendence smacks of the false or bad consciousness of a spurious teleology, the critical secular response that is "human, all too human" (here I am reminded of Foucault's "analytic of finitude") empowers ontological finitude as the basis for the production of heterogeneous open-ended histories. As he is living out the allegory of the Heideggerian "Being towards Death," within the history of his own terminal illness, Said, with a chronic daring and sensitivity, captures "lateness" as that irrepressible haunting of the timely and the synchronic by the elusive and non-thematizable contemporaneity of the posthumous. And in this endeavor, he discovers an elective affinity in Theodor Adorno with whom Said shares so little, i.e., discursively and stylistically. The same Edward Said who is an advocate of the importance of what is being said rather than of how it is said, in the case of Adorno, keenly appreciates the fact that "Adorno's prose violates various norms, that Adorno "assumes little community of understanding between himself and his audience," and that he is "unjoumalistic, unpackageable, unskimmable" (Late 14-15). Excited, (and this excitement sounds as affective and visceral as cognitive, a frissons where, to borrow from Ranajit Guha, "the existential tangles with the epistemological,,)28 by Adorno's words that "in fighting ornament, illusion, reconciliation, communication, humanism, and success," (qtd. in Said 19) art is rendered untenable, Said offers us the following understanding of Adorno's critical agency. "What Adorno does is theoretical-that is, his construction isn't supposed to be a replica of the real thing, which had he attempted it would have been little more than a packaged and domesticated copy. The location of Adorno's writing is theory, a space where he can construct his demystifying negative dialectics" (19). Why is it that Adorno's "demystifying negative dialectics" appeals to Said, and not, say Derridean deconstruction or Foucauldian genealogy? I

109

do not have the time or the appropriate context here to get into this question, but I will merely suggest that the reason is that in Adorno's discourse, however esoteric, "the existential tangles with the epistemological," and the aesthetic, like Sisyphus, cannot but must go on doing its eternally meaningless but humanly significant task. 29 Derrida's theory, in Said's understanding that I do not necessarily endorse, on the other hand textualizes experience beyond the vicissitudes and debacles of representation. The other theme in Adorno that haunts Said both in the abstract and in the concrete is the category of "negation," a term that is important to yet another figure who inspired and challenged Said endlessly, Glen Gould. Negation, as a category is relational, between Being and Knowing, between Ontology and Epistemology. If human finitude entails the acceptance of a nothingness beyond (Heidegger would ask, "why the something rather than the nothing," and Nietzsche would rail against the life denying philosophers who have literally made a "nothing" of the nothing), then accepting that vulnerability, and here I am thinking of Judith Butler's important work, Precarious Life, becomes an affirmation. 3o Between the form of the affirmation and the nothingness of which it is an affirmation, there opens up a space that resists coordination: a space that aesthetics tries to occupy symptomatically, forever and rigorously avoiding the hubris of the ostensive gesture that pretends to point to something that escapes human indexicality. It is this in this aesthetic tension that the human attempts to name what it cannot redeem, and redeem what it cannot name. As Said is paraphrasing a memorable speech delivered by Glen Gould in November 1964 at the University of Toronto, he offers the readers the following interpretation of the status and the meaning of negation in Glen Gould's discourse. Music is a rational, constructed system; it is artificial because it is humanly constructed, not natural; it is an assertion against the "negation" or senselessness of what everywhere surrounds us; and most important, it depends on invention as something that involves venturing beyond system into the negation (which is Gould's way of describing the world outside music), then coming back into system as represented by music. Whatever else this description is, it is not the expected kind of professional counsel volunteered by virtuoso instrumentalists who perhaps would more likely be dishing out advice about practicing hard, being faithful to the score, and things of that sort. Gould is doing the difficult and surprisingly ambitious task of stating a credo about striving for coherence, system, and invention in thinking about music as an art of expression and interpretation. (Lale 123-4)

R. Radhakrishnan

Edward Said's Literary Humanism

Said's statements here bring to mind the manner in which he differentiates the textual reality of Derridean deconstruction and the possibilities that Foucault offers the critic for getting into the text, then out into the ambient context, and then back into the now differently realized text. 31 Not an ontological and not an anti-anthropocentric thinker, Said is happy with the systemic and constructed "nature" of the musical/aesthetic text. Unlike a Heidegger who would wax eloquent with his theory of Gelassenheit and about the holding void in the jug or strategies by which the "language of being" may be allowed to manifest itself in the clearing that is to be mage within "the being of language" (and it is worth recalling that it is precisely this kind of Heideggerian thinking that was excoriated mercilessly by Adorno in his book, The Jargon ofAuthenticity), Said, in agreement with Gould, posits pre-human ontology as sense-less and as an ambient "nothingness.,,32 As a secular inventor, not a discoverer or re-presenter of the primordial presence of Being, what Said is interested in is in the venturing out into a senselessness that awaits being worlded by human touch. Said's solicitude is not for Being or Ontology (no onticoontological difference in Edward Said's world or discourse), but for human realities and experiences in all their vulnerability to systemic objectification and de-subjectivation by discourse. What comes to mind here is that plangent description of St. Petersburg by the spiteful, ressentiment driven anti-hero-narrator of Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground: "that most abstract and intentional city." The human, all too human project, to invoke Nietzsche's famous formulation, is to de-ossity the abstraction and reclaim the world of intentionality. And of course, we know there was no better theorist of the abstract-in-the-concrete and vice versa than Adorno. The other important point that Said is making as he conjoins his vision with Glen Gould's performative thesis is that there is a dire need to bring performance and theory together, to synthesize creativity with metacreative critical thinking. What impresses Said lastingly about Glen Gould's pedagogy is that it does not prescribe technical exercises towards virtuosity, but rather a thinking "about" one's technical and mechanical practice. The theory of the practice is enabled as auto-aware performance. Existential temporality and aesthetic temporality are implicated in the performance of a reciprocal analysis and appreciation. As he describes the process of Gould's virtuosity, Said is in fact outlining the way the world should be, thanks to the utopian imagination made possible by literature and aesthetics. "Gould's virtuosity first of all expanded the confines of performance to allow the music being rendered to show, present, reveal its essential motivic mobility, its creative energies, as well as the processes of

thought that constructed it by composer and performer equally" (Late 132). It is precisely because so much is at stake in aesthetic performativity that technique matters, and the form of the music matters, as does the text, as does the accountability of the performer to the composer: all this not in the name of aesthetic rarefaction or the vapid theory of art for art's sake, but in the name of that "motivic mobility" that pertains to life and to art. I conclude with Said's paradoxical reading of the human situation as expressed by Adorno in his reading of Beethoven: a typically mediated insight characterized by its own "motivic mobility."

110

III

Bereft of ultimate harmony between subjective and objective-here Adorno reasserts the primacy in late Beethoven of an irreconcilable, permanently un-resolved internal opposition-the Missa in reality "is a work of exclusion, of permanent renunciation." What it also renounces in the process is the aim of reconciling "the universally human" with a concrete way of being human. (92) 1 think it was John Keats who in a moment of deep despair said this of himself and his life: I lead a posthumous life. God knows Keats had his problems: unrequited love, a losing battle with tuberculosis, the experience of having lost a brother to that same fell disease, and the bashing that he got from his so-called reviewers for his poetry. The real issue facing the "human condition," as it lives out its drama between the empirical and the transcendent, between the punitive richness of the concrete and the elusive dream of the universal, between the seduction of subjectivity and nonnative interpellation by objectivity, is this: How to be precociously posthumous; how to perform mortality pre-punctually as theoretical concept and aesthetic possibility, well before the factual banality of literal death? Edward Said's life and career are an impassioned and lucid response to these questions.

Notes I

For more on Said's perspective on intellectuals, see his book, Representations of

the Intellectual.

For more on this, see my chapter, "Said and the Politics of Humanism" in my book, History the Human, and the World Between, published by Duke University fress, May 2008. See Raymond Williams's Resources of Hope, and the conversation between Edward Said and Raymond Williams in Raymond Williams's The Politics of 2

Modernism.

R. Radhakrishnan

Edward Said's Literary Humanism

I here refer to the number of debates that had to do with the hierarchical subsumptive or non-subsumptive relationship among different isms, such .as humanism, existentialism, Marxism, etc. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism. 5 See the works of Sheldon Wolin for more on "democracy." See also my essay, "When is Democracy Political?" forthcoming in boundQly 2. 6 See Martin Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism"; Michel Foucault, The Order 0/ Things; and Louis Althusser, The Stn/cturalist Controversy. 7 For a simultaneously poslmodern and postcolonial adumbration of the inauguration of newness, see Homi Bhabha, The Location o/Culture. 8 For more on the relationship between "solidarity" and "critique," see the chapter, "Criticism between Culture and System" in Edward Said's, The World, the Text and the Critic. See also, Jacques Derrida, "The University in the Eye of its Pupils." 9 For more on positionality of the critique, whether "inside" or "outside," see Antonio Gramsci's elaboration of the "war of maneuver" in Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. 10 See Bruce Robbins on cosmopolitanism. See also, Cosmopolitics, Eds. Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah. 11 See Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World, and Abdul Jan Mohamed on Said as the border intellectual in Edward Said: A Critical Reader. 12 See Jacques Derrida, Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. 13 See my chapter on Said in History, the Human and the World Between. 14 For more on the intricate relationship between aesthetics and politics in the context of western Marxist cultural and literary theory, see Aesthetics & Politics, edited by Fredric Jameson. For a thorough critical analysis of the aesthetic in the Western tradition, see Terry Eagleton, The Ideology o/the Aesthetic. 15 See Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, for a sometimes fair and other times unfair critique of Saidian ambivalencies and inclusiveness. 16 See Sir Philip Sidney, "An Apologie for Poesie." 17 See Edward Said, "Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims." 18 See Reflexive Waters edited by Fons Elder. 19 Judith Butler offers us the eloquent phrase, "contingent foundations," Arjun Appadurai, the locution, "constructed primordial." See also Chapter I, "Postmodernism and the Rest of the World," in my book, Theory in an Uneven World. 20 Raymond Williams's blurb for Said's The World, The Text and The Critic. 21 My chapter on Said in my book, History, the Human, and the World Between, begins with a detailed interpretation of the cover design of Said's book, Humanism and Democratic Criticism. 22 For more on the power hold of the genre, see Jacques Derrida, ''The Law of Genre." Trans. Avital Ronell. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. I, On Narrative (Autumn, 1980), pp. 55-81 23 For more on the nature of the intersubjective freedom negotiated between "reader" and "writer," see Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?

" See Jacques Derrida, "Cogito and the History of Madness," in Writing and Di!Jerence, and Foucault's response to Derrida's biting critique, "This Paper, My Flesh." 2S See the chapter "Voyage In," initially published in Raritan, in Said's book, Cullure and Imperialism. 26 See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, and Habitations 0/ Model'llity, for the relationship of the non-West to the Enlightenment. 27 See Abdul JanMohamed, The Death-Bound Subject: Richard Wright's Archaeology 0/ Death. 28 See Ranakit Guha, History and the End 0/ World History, and my discussion of Guha in History, the Human, and the World Between. 29 For more on an analysis of the myth, see Albert Camus, The Myth 0/ Sisyphus. lO See Judith Butler, Precarious Life. II See Edward Said, "Criticism between Culture and System." l2 See Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, and Theodor Adorno, The Jargon 0/ AUlhenticity.

112

4

113

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. The Jargon of Authenticity. New York & London: Routledge, 2006. Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations and Literatures. London & New York: Verso 2008. Althusser, Louis. The Humanist Controversy and Other Essays. Trans. Matheron, Francois & Goshgarian, G.M. London & New York: Verso, 2003. Bhabha, Homi. The Location ofCulture. New York & London: Routledge, 2004. Brennan, Timothy. At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. Chakravarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. -Habitations ofModernity. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002. Derrida, Jacques. Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Trans. Mark Dooley & Michael Hughes. London: Routledge: 2001. - . "The University in the Eye of its Pupils." Diacritics 13 (1983): 3-20. - . "The Law of Genre." Critical Inquiry 7.1 (1980): 55-81. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Notes from the Underground. Trans. Hugh Alpin. London: Hesperus Press, 2006. Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Malden & Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.

115

R. Radhakrishnan

Edward Said's Literary Humanism

Elder, Fons. Ed. Reflexive Waters: The Basic Concerns of Mankind. New York: Souvenir Press, 1974. Foucault, Michel. The Order ofThings. New York: Vintage, 1973. - . "My Body, this Paper, this Fire." Trans. Geoff Bennington. Oxford Literary Review 4 (1979). Gourgouris, Stathis. "Transformation, not Transcendence." boundary 2, vol31 (2004): 55-79. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Ed. & Trans. Quinton Hoare & Geoffrey Newell Smith. N6w York: International Publishers, 1971. Guha, Ranajit. History at the Limit of World-History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003 Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. Trans. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper Collins, 1993. Jameson, Fredric. Ed. Aesthetics and Politics. New York: Verso, 1997. JanMohamed, Abdul. The Death-Bound Subject: Richard Wright's Archaeology ofDeath. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Nandi, Ashis. The Savage Freud. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. Sprinker, Michael. Ed. Edward Said: A Critical Reader. Malden & Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1993. Radhakrishnan, R. History, the Human, and the World Between, Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming. -. Theory in an Uneven World. Malden & Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. - . "When is Democracy Political?" boundary 233.3. (2006): 103-22. Robbins, Bruce & Pheng, Cheah. Cosmopolitics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Said, Edward. The World, the Text and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983. -. Representations ofthe Intellectual. New York: Pantheon, 1994. -. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. -. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. - . Freud and the Non-European. London & New York: Verso, 2003. - . On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006. - . "Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims." Social Text I (1979): 758. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Humanism. Trans. Philip Maire!. Brooklyn, N.Y: Haskell House, 1977. Sidney, Sir Philip. Defense of Poesie. Ed. Lewis Soens. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970.

Williams, Raymond. Resources ofHope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism. Ed. Robin Gable. New York: Verso, 1989. _. Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. New York: Verso, 2007. Wolin, Sheldon. Politics and Vision: Continuity and Tradition in Western Political Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. _. The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

114

'In that Precarious Exilic Realm': Edward Said's Andalusian Journeys

CHAPTER FOUR 'IN THAT PRECARIOUS EXILIC REALM': EDWARD SAID'S ANDALUSIAN JOURNEYS TABEA LINHARD

This article is an exploration of Edward Said's vision of Andalusia as both an origin and a destination, I as a picturesque site to be toured, and as a location where the interaction between violence and tolerance demands new reflections, particularly vis-a-vis recent migratory flows between Southern SpaiD and Northern Africa? Said's "Andalusia's Journey," a brief essay published in Travel + Leisure in 2002 does not specifically refer to these flows, as it is geared at a very different sort of traveler than the immigrants who continue arriving along Spanish coasts in makeshift boats, clinging to life and the hope of a better future. However, while Said speaks from the glossy pages of a high-end travel magazine, the text's contradictions (which also are Andalusia's contradictions) reveal that the author does not divert from the tasks of a public intellectual-tasks which Said defined as the intellectual's responsibilities in the 1993 Reith Lectures, later published as Representations ofthe Intellectual. While Said clearly states that these lectures are not to be taken as a form of autobiography (xii), the critical voice that comes across in "Andalusia's Journey" belongs to the role that the author reassesses in the final chapter of Humanism and Democratic Criticism: "The intellectual's role is to present alternative narratives and other perspectives on history than those provided by combatants on behalf of official memory and national history and mission" (141). In light of Said's stated role, his "Andalusia's Journey" is here read as far more than a short piece of travel journalism. While the text initially displays a nostalgic vision of Andalusia, turning the region into an anachronistic model that would ideally aid in solving contemporary conflicts in the Mediterranean world, Said's writing ultimately reverses such a one-dimensional understanding of the region and its history. Instead, in this succinct text, Said calls for an ongoing interrogation of the

117

meanings that cultural heritage attains within the Spanish-and also in a global and postcolonial~ontext. A close reading of the text is timely and relevant for three additional reasons. First, a number of sites, restored and re-imagined city quarters, monuments and museums have turned both Arab and Jewish Spain into an accessible and popular travel destination. The offerings are plentiful for those who yearn to wander the streets of the rediscovered Jewish quarters ill cities like Gerona and Toledo, or to admire the intricacies of the Alhambra in Granada and the Mosque in Cordova-two monuments that Said eloquently describes in his text. Second, the fact that the three cultures that once coexisted in the Iberian peninsula remain involved in wide-ranging and often violent conflicts in different parts of the Mediterranean world, may make it easy to reify the Medieval coexistence of Arabs, Jews and Christians into a nostalgia for an impossibly harmonious future. I will later return to the issue of coexistence or "collvivencia" in order to argue that Said's vision of Andalusia relates to connections between a multicultural-yet not necessarily harmoniouspast and an uncertain present. Third, immigration from Northern Africa is radically changing contemporary Spain and its relationship to its postcolonial legacies. Said does not discuss migration in Andalusia in this particular text, yet its causes and consequences should remain in the background of the analysis that follows.

Specters of Carmen Every Andalusian journey, including Said's, should begin with a story. Possibly, the same statement could be made about any form of travel literature: good travel writing may be more about good stories than about the places themselves. Drawing a boundary between fact and fiction in certain travel narratives can indeed become a futile exercise: "Like certain forms of investigative journalism-another member of the genre's extended family-travel writing enjoys an intermediary status between subjective inquiry and objective documentation" (Holland and Huggan II ).

Bearing this in mind, I would like to briefly consider a literary heroine Who embodies most Andalusian fantasies: Prosper Merimee's Carmen. The gypsy seductress first appeared in print in 1845: the author published the first three chapters of the novella in the Revue de Deux Mondes, a JOUrnal that similar to Said's venue for "Andalusia's Journey," "had originally been founded s a bi-weekly travel journal depicting, for the Civilized 'world' of France, exotic landscapes and adventures in what

118

Tabea Linhard

'In that Precarious Exilic Realm': Edward Said's Andalusian Journeys

119

today we call the Third World" (Robinson qtd. in Clark 198). Since the novella appeared in a journal specialized in travel narratives, many of his readers probably took the torrid love story between Carmen and Don Jose to be another fact-based travel narrative. The publication was, after all, devoted to this type of prose, and the author had already published narratives of his travels to Andalusia in similar magazines (Revue de Paris, L 'Artiste). To make matters even more illusory, "Merimee did everything to encourage this reading of his tale as a verite vecue (Clark 189). The plot ofthe novella is said to be based on an anecdote-a jealo\!s lover kills the unfaithful Andalusian gypsy woman he adores-narrated to Merimee by the Countess of Montijo, with whom he became friends in one of his trips to Spain. Finally, Merimee himself was fond of literary hoaxes and games that questioned (or even mocked) authority and identity: his first collection of plays, Le Theatre de Clara Gazul (1825) was supposed to be written by a Spanish actress, and the book's cover features a portrait of a cross-dressed Prosper Merimee "wearing a mantilla a necklace and a frilly dress" (Raitt qtd. in Clark 189). An interrogation of identity and authority also is at stake once Edward Said travels as a Palestinian Arab to Andalusia on four different occasions, beginning in 1966. Even though he does not mention the figure of the fiery, Flamencodancing seductress, Carmen's specter still becomes a useful trope for the understanding of Andalusia this analysis aims to convey. This specter should not be taken for a representation of a subaltern, female subject-a real-life Andalusian gypsy that Merimee may have encountered on a quest for exotic and sensuous adventures in Southern Spain. Instead, Said's Andalusian journeys are haunted by the fantasies of what Andalusia was once imagined to be, including both the vision of the co-existence of Arabs, Jews and Christians as an idealized form of multiculturalism, and the orientalized vision of Andalusia as an exotic and sensuous locale. Ultimately, Carmen's ghost can be seen as an invitation to learn to "live with the ghosts" of al-Andalus in a Derridean fashion. "And this being-with specters would also be," writes Derrida, "not only but also a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations" (Specters xix).) The inheritance at stake here is found in the remainders of Arabic culture in Spain, which, in spite of the mechanisms of erasure that the Spanish empire put in place already in the 15'h century, stubbornly refuse to disappear. The Spanish empire saw its birth with the Reconquest of the Kingdom of Granada by the Catholic Kings in 1492, the Expulsion Edict that initiated the Sephardic diaspora, and the conquest and colonization of the New World. In spite of its vastness, the empire was short-lived and was

followed by an enduring political and economic decadence, as well as a rhetoric of loss and despair. In "Spanish Nationalism and the Ghost of Empire" Angel Loureiro explains what this decadence implies: A nation beset with problems of self-understanding and self-esteem, Spain has been haunted for two centuries by the specter of its former colonies. Consequently, in the late nineteenth century-and in both Spain and Latin America-an obsessive discourse about Hispanismo begins to develop around the subject of the conquest and colonization of American and ensuing heritage left by Spain in that continent. [... J (T)he Spanish discourse on America is linked to a historical analysis conceived in terms of loss, decadence, ruin and even degeneration. (65) Yet the colonial specters that remain from the conquest of the Americas and its consequences on both sides of the Atlantic may just be a different incarnation of other specters that also resulted from the Spanish imperial 4 formation. Before the loss of the colonies across the Atlantic was even conceivable, Islamic and Jewish Spain were pushed towards the borders of the Iberian peninsula, and its remainders-individuals, monuments, literatures, traditions, sounds, words, flavors-were disguised, silenced, acculturated, hidden, tortured or re-written. Any to journey to Andalusia, as a matter of fact any literal or virtual excursion into past and present Spain (and the nation's diverse forms of literature, art, architecture, languages, or cuisine) will reveal that these remainders have by no means disappeared. Said's text mainly centers on the traces of Arab culture in Andalusia, referring to a "composite Andalusian identity anchored in Arab culture [which] can be discerned in its striking buildings, its tiles and wooden ceilings, its ornate pottery and neatly constructed houses" (Said, "Andalusia" 2). But the term "composite" is key here-while the loss of al-Andalus often evokes a lost paradise in Islamic culture, Said's text reveals the linJits of such a discourse. 5 Coincidentally, Loureiro shows in the above-mentioned essay that in the Spanish context a potentially comparable discourse of loss and decadence begins with the articulation of an inJperial and Orientalist nostalgia in the eighteenth century, which lasted well into the Francoist years: "One of the better-known early formulations of Spanish-history-asdecadence can be found in the late eighteenth century in Jose Cadalso's Cartas Marruecas, in which he proposes remedies to return Spain to the apex it had reached in the fifteenth century with Catholic Kings" (66). Orientalism moves in two, opposing directions in the Spanish context: While imperial discourse in Spain undoubtedly was constructed on an

Tabea Linhard

'In that Precarious Exilic Realm': Edward Said's Andalusian Journeys

Orientalized vision of Latin America and North Africa, Spain itself becomes a sensuous, exotic and conquerable "Orient" in texts like Merimee's Carmen. 6 Thus, traveling to and in Andalusia also means negotiating the different meanings that the Andalusian cultural heritage attains in diverse contexts-not only in fancy travel magazines. Speaking from the pages of a publication like Travel + Leisure may be an unfamiliar location fora thinker like Edward Said; it may seem that here the author's own notion of "traveling theory" is taking him literally and figuratively to new discursixe positions, which ultimately do not lead him safely back "home" (which is where tourism always finds its happy ending) but instead point to something closer to the "intellectual's provisional home" a location the author defines in Humanism and Democratic Criticism (144). Such a home, Said explains at the end of a complex reflection on Humanist critical praxis, "is the domain of an exigent, resistant, intransigent art into which, alas, one can neither retreat nor search for solutions" (144). He concludes these thoughts, suggesting that "only in that precarious exilic realm can one first truly grasp the difficulty of what cannot be grasped and then go forth to try anyway" (144). Significantly, as "Andalusia's Journey" appears in a publication in which Southern Spain may be reduced to an exotic travel destination, Said's text moves beyond its venue, revealing also that Andalusia is always more than the sum of its parts. For the foreign tourist, traveler or armchair traveler who visits Andalusia, a city like Granada still may be "one of the exotic locales par excellence in Romantic culture, a geographic, cultural and temporal elsewhere far removed from the mundane aspects of contemporary reality" (Saglia 194). Said's text, however, makes an attempt to connect Andalusia's exoticism with contemporary reality, navigating the shifting meanings Andalusia attains within Spanish, Arabic, British and American traditions. Or it may just dance around these meanings, just like Carmen's ghost: "And what could be more Andalusian," writes Said, following the earlier citation "than the fiery flamenco dancer, accompanied by hoarse cantaores, martial handclapping, and hypnotically strummed guitars, all of which have precedents in Arabic music?" ("Andalusia" 2).

With "Andalusia's Journey," Said is writing for an audience whose understanding of "travel"-at least when choosing to pick up this particular publication-might exclude the forms of theoretical maneuvers, displacement, exile and diaspora on which Said has written throughout his career. While undoubtedly informative about the region's history and contradictions, the text also depicts the author's inner journey: the essay is as much a description of several trips to Andalusia, as it is a reflection on what these trips mean for Said as an intellectual, a writer, and an Arab. The distinctions between traveling and tourism have been widely discussed in such fields as anthropology and sociology. In the particular case of Spanish Cultural Studies, tourism and its relationship to cultural and political development from the late Francoist era to the present has been a source of productive and provocative work.? Rather than reproducing these debates here, I would like to focus on two issues that are central to my analysis of Said's text, namely, a quest for a cultural experience considered to be "authentic," and the multiple meanings that retuming home attains when traveling. Possibly the most obvious distinction between tourism and other forms of travel is a binary opposition between the authentic (travel) and the inauthentic (tourism) (Curtis and Pajaczkowska 202). Tourism may have been initially understood to function as a "quest for authenticity" (Rojek and Urry II), that is, tourism was to provide the means to escape the daily routine of work and conventional life; touring unknown grounds would provide a way of finding again one's true subjectivity. Rojek and Urry write: 'The world of habitual life is so ordered and managed that authentic feelings are subdued or choked off. Through tourism we are said to have the expression of real feelings" (II). Yet the authors concede that considering a location like Las Vegas reveals that, "tourist sights are increasingly using extravagantly inauthentic accessories to attract tourists"

120

Travel + Tourism Said's brief 2002 essay on Andalusia can be examined alongside his 2004 collection Humanism and Democratic Criticism in order to mark some important distinctions in Said's observations, analysis, and work.

121

(II).

One does not need· to look at Las Vegas--or Disneyland-and its excesses to grasp that tourism nowadays often has become synonymous with simulacra and in-authenticity, with recreation and restoration not of what certain locations like Granada are or might have been, but of what these are expected to signify. 8 Traveling off the beaten path has become the norm literally and metaphorically so that only the beaten paths may be left. The crucial issue here would not be to locate the exact barrier that divides the so-called authentic from the simulacra, or to establish once and for all where traveling ends and tourism begins, but to look instead for other variables that allow us to understand where the differentiation

Tabea Linhard

'In that Precarious Exilic Realm': Edward Said's Andalusian Journeys

between travel and tourism shifts, and why understanding this shift is relevant. Andalusia is a highly popular destination, and in the past decades Andalusian cities, organizations and private companies have made possible different forms of travel focused on the region's multi-ethnic heritage. 9 This does not mean that visitors who tour Alhambra in Granada, or the streets of Cordova and Seville, are going to be merely confronted with nothing more than a miniature Las Vegas or, to use George Ritzer and Allan Liska's term, a "McDisneyization" of Andalusian cultur:al heritage. 1O Rather, tourism oscillates between a quest of the authentic and the perfect simulation that, at least temporarily, fills the gap for an authenticity that can neither be restored nor recreated. Similarly, Said's text oscillates between a travel narrative, tourist guide and a philosophical interrogation of what "home" may mean for a writer like Said. In these Andalusian journeys the expected meets the unexpected, and returning home from this journey is both possible and impossible. Curtis and Pajaczkowska argue that the opposite of tourism would not be a largely authentic experience, or not embarking on any form of travel in the first place. The opposite of tourism would be "the involuntary travel associated with the predicament of the immigrant. If the tourist travels, for the most part, backwards in time, then the immigrant, the exile and the diasporic travel forwards with no promise of a restored home" (202-203). The ambivalent sense of "home" which comes across in Said's text also suggests that "Andalusia's Journey" oscillates between travel backwards and travel forwards, between tourism and other, much more complex meanings of displacement. This ambivalence, ultimately, also is what accentuates the above-mentioned critical voice in the essay. In a discussion of the predicaments of intellectual exiles, which also is part of the Reith Lectures, Said explains what the impossibility of returning home implies: "Exile for the intellectual in this metaphysical sense is restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others. You cannot go back to some earlier or perhaps more stable condition of being at home; and, alas, you can never fully arrive, be at one with your new home or situation" (Representations 53). While at first it may seem that a search for an ancestral home that could provide both answers and comfort motivates Said's earlier journeys to Andalusia, the text reveals that rather than encountering a "restored home," the author ends up facing his own nostalgia for a place that never existed. This nostalgia is apparent in Said's descriptions of his consecutive journeys to Andalusia, which begin in 1966, during the Francoist dictatorship. He admits that at the time Andalusia was "wonderfully

picturesque" but he contrasts his vision of Granada with the ways in which masS tourism has already changed other Spanish cities, that is, "the burgeoning and quite sleazy mass tourist trade that had put down roots in Malaga (not to mention the ghastly neighboring village of Torremolinos)" ("Andalusia" I). Moreover, Said, at least in the initial moments of the text, still seems to yearn for the restored home to which Curtis and Pajazchowka refer: "But for me, and indeed for many Arabs, Andalusia still represents the fmest flowering of our culture. That is particularly true now, when the Arab Middle East seems mired in defeat and violence, its societies unable to arrest their declining fortunes, its secular culture so full of almost surreal crisis, shock and nihilism" (2). However, later in the text Said undermines this very idea, when he admits that Andalusia, with is striking monuments and watery gardens, "makes a rather too facile, moral lesson of the place" (2). At this point in the text Said moves away from a nostalgic idealization of Andalusia and explores instead the region's conflicts and ghosts, traveling with the baggage of a Palestinian Arab, "as someone whose diverse background might offer a way of seeing and understanding the place beyond illusion and romance" (2). In lieu of displaying the attributes of a lost paradise, in Said's text Andalusia reveals the constant negotiation between historical repression of Arab culture and the persistent remainders of this culture: "The Arabs journeyed along the shores of the Mediterranean through Spain, France, and Italy, all of which now bear their traces, even if those traces are not always acknowledged," writes Said (2). And little by little the contradictions of Andalusia come about: everywhere he looks, Said finds traces of Spain's Arab as well as Spain's Jewish heritage, echoing the work of renowned Hispanist Americo Castro on Spanish history and civilization. For Castro, these Arab and Jewish cultural traces are not the remnants of a foreign invasion that distorted a supposed national and ethnic unity of an essential and timeless Spanish identity. Instead, the encounter between these different cultures is what constitutes Spanish culture in the first place. Challenging more orthodox versions of history, CaSlro argues that rather than an interruption of a pre-existing Spanish "essence," the Arab invasion in 711, together with the Jewish presence, largely tolerated in Arab Spain, is part and parcel of the history and civilization of a country that never was and never will be monocultural." . The moment when Said questions why the Arabic heritage in Spain hngered for so long "if Arabs had represented only a negligible phase in Spanish history" (4), Said's Andalusian journeys do not only take him across the Atlantic, from New York to Spain, but also across time. His final destination is not a restored home, but a location that remains both

122

123

124

Tabea Linhard

out ofplace and out of time. 12 Said's travels to and within Andalusia are not a journey to a restored home, yet still a journey that makes him (and consequently, his readers) aware of a precarious, un-restorable home. In "Andalusia's Journey," tourism coexists discursively with other forms of travel; the text's contradictions also are the contradictions of Andalusia and what it stands for. And if the traveler is able to return home from this journey "backwards in time" the only home he shall return to will necessarily be a "precarious and exilic realm" (Said, Humanism 141). The text therefore is far more than a search for the "authentic" Andalusia, or a quest for the sole, real Andalusian journey, which would reveal the artificiality of other journeys to Andalusia. Instead, Said's text also challenges the very idea of such a quest for authenticity.

An Andalusian Palimpsest "Andalusia's Journey" may initially reinforce the idea of a lost paradise where watery gardens and shady patios served as a backdrop for the harmonious co-existence of Arabs, Jews and Christians before 1492. A close reading of the text, however, reveals that what Said really encounters in Andalusia are palimpsests: trace upon trace and writing upon writing bear witness to conflict rather than harmony. Said writes: "Andalusia' multiplies in the mind with its contradictions and puzzles; its history is a history of the masks and assumed identities it has worn" ("Andalusia" 2). The term palimpsest commonly refers to a parchment or vellum from which an earlier text has been erased or scraped in order to make room for a new inscription; the fact that the remainders of the older text are usually still noticeable has turned the palimpsest into a useful image within a poststructural and postcolonial context. JJ Cultural imprints tell stories that challenge colonial master narratives, stories that become, to use Said's terms, histories of masks and assumed identities. The important point is that Said never specifies what lies hidden underneath these masks, underneath these assumed identities. The Andalusian history he encounters during his journeys that span three decades is a history of these conflicts and their remainders. This becomes clear in his description of the "mosque-cum-Cathedral" in Cordova: "The great mosque was later barbarically seized by a Christian monarch who turned it into a church. He did this by inserting an entire cathedral into the Muslim structure's center, in an aggressive erasure of history and statement of faith" (4). Scratching the imprints on a palimpsest would then not reveal the origin (of Andalusian culture) but instead display the constant interactions and conflicts between cultures, within communities and among individuals.

'In that Precarious Exilic Realm': Edward Said's Andalusian Journeys

125

Yet even the most "aggressive forms of erasure," and even this "statement of faith" end up revealing their own futility, as Said explains: "the whole composition is always in evidence-always changing yet always somehow the same-a unity in multiplicity" (1). The mosque/cathedral is a palimpsestic structure, as Andalusian culture as a whole may be: it is more than the sum of its parts, but it also is more than what Said himself calls the "amazingly mixed Arab, Jewish and Latin cultural centers of Cordova, Granada and Seville" (I). Andalusia is not just a palimpsest because the structures of its monuments are constant reminders of the Arab and Jewish presence, instead, Said's text reveals that Andalusian culture is palimpsestic: the remainders of past conflicts are what constitute the Andalusian cultural heritage Said discusses in his text. These also are the traces that reveal a countermemory Said is ready to articulate, in spite of this unconventional and leisurely venue in which this text appears. 14 I have argued earlier in this essay, that in spite of the inherent contradictions in "Andalusia's Journey" Said's text remains engaged with "alternative narratives and other perspectives on history" (Humanism 141). Said writes that Andalusia was "a particularly lively instance of the dialogue, much more than the clash of cultures" ("Andalusia" I), however, the palimpsestic nature of Andalusia that becomes apparent in Said's text challenges a nostalgic view of such a dialogue. In a text in which tourism and travel coexist, Said the traveler, Said the tourist, and Said the intellectual confront one of the tasks of the intellectual, articulated in the final chapter of Humanism and Democratic Criticism: "The need now is for deintoxicated, sober histories that make evident the multiplicity and complexity of history without allowing one to conclude that it moves forward impersonally, according to laws determined either by the divine or by the powerful" (141). So while the readers who pick up a copy of Travel + Leisure may just yearn for an escape, to "leave behind a modern world of disillusionment, strife, and uncertainty" ("Andalusia" I) and find calm and harmony in a structure like the Alhambra in Granada, Said's text suggests that those who choose to travel to Andalusia (literally or not) are bound to encounter in the same time the "multiplicity and complexity of history" (Humanism 141). The twofold meaning of the text also links "Andalusia's Journey" to Said's secular humanism, his critique of Buro-centrism and imperialism. Said's secular humanism may also be what makes him so attentive to the violence caused by religious strife in Andalusian, and Spanish history as a whole, long before and long after 1492. In his text, Said reminds us that the violent attempt to erase Arab culture was neither successful, nor

Tabea Linhard

'In that Precarious Exilic Realm': Edward Said's Andalusian Journeys

complete: "Yet, classical Mudejar art, with its typically florid arabesques and geometrical architecture, was produced after the Muslims were defeated. As far as Catalonia, Gaudi's obsession with botanical motifs shows the Arab influence at its most profound" ("Andalusia" 4). The influence of Arab culture hardly is limited to art and architecture. From the Medieval romances to Cervantes' Don Quixote, all the way to Juan Goytisolo's Don Julian (a novel Said also mentions in the article), and recent literary texts focusing on migration and its consequences in an increasingly multicultural society, it may not even be possible to fully grasp what Spanish literature is all about, without understanding the lingering Arab presence. 1S

palimpsestic language, displaying the remainders of the violent and tolerant co-existence of the three cultures in Medieval Spain. 16 Don Quixote, emerges from the extremely contradictory and sedimented society that could be found in the Iberian peninsula in the years that followed the reconquest of Arab Spain, the expulsion of the Jews, and the conquest of the Americas. These were the years, briefly, when certain processes of religious and ethnic identification, either evident, concealed or falsified, acquired a whole new set of shifting meanings, often with devastating consequences for individuals and communities as a whole. Said does not specifically discuss Don Quixote in his essay-the errant knight, after all, never makes it to Andalusia. Yet in addition to the undeniable Arab cultural imprints in this novel, the fact that Cervantes is understood to be "one of the founders of modern literature and a giant of the European canon" (Childers 77) needs to be considered here, particularly bearing in mind the importance the author places on narrative in Culture and Imperialism. Here, Said analyses novels in order to understand the discursive mechanisms of colonization and decolonization. 17 The fact that the Spanish empire and its (decadent) remainders are for the most part absent from this study is somewhat pe!plexing. Said justifies the limits of his cO!pus in the book's preface in the following terms: "What I am saying about the British, French and American imperial experience is that it has a unique coherence and a special cultural centrality" (xxii). Said also provides two further reasons for limiting his corpus: the "overseas rule" or 'Jumping beyond adjacent territories to very distant lands" and, [mally, his own upbringing and education in the US, French and British contexts" (xxiii). A brief and seemingly extraneous text like "Andalusia's Journey" might not fill the lacunae that the author readily acknowledges in his broader analysis of culture and empire. However, this succinct text still provides a missing link between the Spanish imperial expansion from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, and the contingencies Said analyzes in such texts as Culture and Imperialism, and also Orientalism. These connections do not correspond to a direct and unwavering line between the moment when the first Andalusian beach was conquered from the South in 711 to consequences of such events as 9/11 or 3/11. Rather, I would like to avoid the all-too-easy fusion between past, present and future, which often happens when the Medieval co-existence of three cultures or "conviviencia" is understood to be a "road map" that could solve present conflicts in Spain, and in the Mediterranean world as a Whole. As mentioned earlier, there is a slight tendency to do so in the initial moments of Said's text, which needs to be examined further.

126

Don Quixote's Ghost So while a palimpsestic structure of a monument like the Mosque in Cordova needs to be understood in the context of religiosity, edifices like the mosque or the Alhambra, or even street quarters like the Barrio de Albaicin in Granada, or the Juderia (Jewish Quarter) in Seville tell stories within stories-not unlike the text that gave birth to the modern novel, Don Quixote. The narrator of Cervantes' novel, we need to remember, translates the text from the original aljamiado, the Romance vernacular in Arabic script. The text's original author is an Arab, Cide Hamete Benengeli. This character, following William Childers "displaces the idea of any essentialized cultural identity or preordained order to which the text could correspond" (70). Maria Rosa Menocal poignantly describes the genesis of the second part of the novel in her book The Ornament of the World. She narrates how in the beginning of Book II of Don Quixote, the narrator has traveled to Toledo, in search of the manuscript of Book I, which is about to be destroyed, so that the material on which the text was written can be reused. The man is wandering down these streets because it is now the neighborhood of the rag sellers. The old neighborhood of books and the men who wrote the books and translated books for the world has become a place where the books no one is supposed to read anymore are turned into pulp. The man sees a boy with a pile of papers he is trying to sell to an old silk merchant, and he can tell they are written in Arabic. (254) The pile of papers is the first part of the adventures of Don Quixote, written, as I already mentioned, in aljamiado. The narrator now has to find a translator who will help him to read a text written in a language that officially no longer exists on Iberian soil. Similar to ladino, aljamiado is a

127

128

Tabea Linhard

'In that Precarious Exilic Realm'; Edward Said's Andalusian Journeys

Convivencia's Ghosts

the Mosque in Cordova, will not lead him, nor any visitor back to a more harmonious time, or even to a restored "home." These buildings, bearing the marks of violence and tolerance-before 1492-and also the marks of a violent attempt to erase this history of violence and tolerance-after 1492-{fo not reveal, to use Nirenberg's terms, a "history of persecuting mentalities." Instead, the Andalusian cultural heritage reveals itself in constant negotiations, arch by arch, stone by stone, millimeter by millimeter, of what Said himself calls a world "whose multiple identities formed an enriched diversity" ("Andalusia" 6). Nirenberg's analysis ultimately teaches us to be wary of hasty, impatient connections between past and present, between the ritualized violence against minorities in Medieval Spain and contemporary acts of racial violence in a world of increasing and daily changing migratory patterns. Even though Said does not specifically mention the term "convivencia" in his text, "Andalusia's Journey," still reveals that convivencia, should not be understood in the manner of a teleological narrative, as an unwavering line between the Medieval Mediterranean world and the present, or, to use Maria Rosa MenocaI's terms, from an idealized Andalusian past to "Andalusian Shards." Menocal's work, not unlike Said's text, discusses a certain nostalgia for a lost reign of tolerance. IS She writes:

Said himself refers to Andalusia as the site of dialogue, rather than clash of cultures ("Andalusia" 1). Particularly in the beginning of the text, Said refers to convivencia with a longing for harmony and tolerance. Muslims, Jews and Christians co-existed with astonishing harmony. Today, its periods of fruitful cultural diversity may provide a model for the coexistence of peoples, a model quite different from the ideological battles, local chauvinism, and ethnic conflict that finally brought it down-and ~ which ironically enough threaten to engulf our own 21 "-ceotury world. (1) After all, the fact that the Medieval cohabitation of the three cultures that once shared the Iberian peninsula are still involved in wide-ranging conflict in the Mediterranean world can easily tum this "convivencia" into nostalgia for the future that never was. Yet even though Said's text displays this vision at the beginning of his essay, the text also contains a shift from a desire for harmony to an understanding of the inevitability of conflict. It is usually understood that convivencia-while already in crisis before this date---ended with forging of the Spanish Imperial Nation in 1492. In lieu of proposing convivencia as a model of co-existence, 1 would argue that this historically unique cohabitation needs to be understood through a consideration of the antagonistic relationships between the different cultures and the ways in which different exchanges, ranging from trade to cultural translations, were possible. Historian David Nirenberg's book Communities of Violence takes the issue of convivencia further, as his historical analysis is about "barter and negotiation, not about the creation of a "persecuting discourse" (6). Instead of discussing the medieval coexistence in terms of harmony, Nirenberg uses the term tolerance. Rather than being a given, this tolerance was constantly negotiated, defined and redefined. Nirenberg therefore recognizes a "fundamental interdependence of violence and tolerance in the Middle Ages" (7). Nirenberg's book emphasizes that "violence was a central and systemic aspect of the coexistence of majority and minorities. Convivencia was predicated upon violence; it was not its peaceful antithesis. Violence drew its meaning from coexistence, not in opposition to it" (245). Such an understanding of historical developments also challenges a teleological view of history in which what began in the Middle Ages would lead directly to the present. To return to Said's text, it is important to point out that the serenity Said recognizes in the Alhambra or the "unity in multiplicity" he finds in

129

From the normative perspective of the history of Islam or the Arabicspeaking peoples, al-Andalus is reckoned more a nostalgic curiosity than anything else-and mostly, in the end, a failure, because Islam did not survive as one of the religions in Europe and because by 1492, Granada, the last Islamic city-state in Europe, was quashed and the "Moors" (the disparaging Christian term for Muslims), along with the Jews, were driven out of Spain. (10) Thus, while Menocal emphasizes the tolerance of the Andalusian world, she admits that a culture of tolerance necessarily is a culture of contradictions. The author explains that a culture of tolerance means living with its contradictions-and its ghosts. The contradictions of Andalusian life fell victim to the Spanish Inquisition, whose history needs to be understood in the context of imperial expansion across land and sea. Menocal writes: "The Spanish Inquisition was set up to cure the perceived ills created by five hundred years of a society that did tolerate Contradictions of all sorts" (271). In this passage the affmity between Said and Menocal may be the strongest. Both texts ultimately show that the Contradictions of Andalusian culture, the contradictions of any text about Andalusia can only be partially grasped.

Tabea Linhard

'In that Precarious Exilic Realm': Edward Said's Andalusian Journeys

So the point is not to find the historic or individual causality that led to the end of convivencia and the end of tolerance, but to understand the ways in which tolerance and intolerance, coexistence and violence were (and are) in constant negotiation. What Said encounters in his different crossings to and within Andalusia are the remainders of these constant and open-ended negotiations.

discusses first in is 1983 essay ''Traveling Theory" and later revises in "Traveling Theory Reconsidered." The ultimate conclusion Said reaches in his later essay is that, "(t)he point of theory therefore is to travel, always to move beyond its confinements, to emigrate, to remain in a sense in exile" ("Traveling Theory Reconsidered" 451). In the earlier essay Said describes a process in which theories travel to other times and locations and end up losing "some of their original power and rebelliousness" ("Traveling Theory Reconsidered" 436). The earlier essay provides an analysis of Georg Lukacs' History of Class Consciousness, particularly, his theory of reification, which emerges from the political and historical contingencies of what the author experienced in Budapest in the early twentieth century. Said explains the ways in which later thinkers (Lucien Goldmann and Raymond Williams) elaborated on Lukacs' theory. However, once the theory or reification travels to Paris (Goldmann) and Cambridge (Williams) respectively, "the ideas of this theory had shed their insurrectionary force, had been tamed and domesticated somewhat, and became considerably less dramatic in their application and gist" ("Traveling Theory Reconsidered" 437). Said argues further: "What seemed almost inevitable was that when theories traveled and were used elsewhere they ironically acquired the prestige and authority of age, perhaps even becoming a kind of dogmatic orthodoxy" (437). Yet neither Said's first approach to "traveling theories", nor his later reconsiderations are an argument for a sort of academic provincialism in which a first-hand and easily essentialized experience provides exclusive access to certain ideas, theories or even memories. Quite the contrary, both essays ultimately show that theories travel unavoidably, and call for the critic's responsibility when addressing the movement of theories across time and space: "This movement suggests the possibility of actively different locales, sites, situations for theory, without facile universalism or overgeneral totalizing" ("Traveling Theory Reconsidered" 452). The author ends his essay inviting critics and readers to witness and understand these complex journeys:

130

Traveling Theory Said's journeys to Andalusia serve as a useful guide to the region's history and sites, yet his Travel + Leisure essay also displays an attempt to locate a lost home, only to eventually discover a home that never was anything but a "precarious exilic realm." While "Andalusia's Journey" precedes Humanism and Democratic Criticism and while they are both written for very different audiences and, one could say, in different registers, both still gesture at the same issues: speaking from and about Andalusia also means speaking from and about a precarious exilic position. The article is far more than an invitation to leisurely walks in Seville and Cordova, far more than useful historical background about the history of al-Andalus, which might enrich the Andalusian experience of the sophisticated and worldly traveler. Said ultimately reveals a constant confrontation with one's limits reflected in the above-mentioned conclusions of Humanism and Democratic Criticism. At the end of the journey the intellectual (the travel writer, the postcolonial critic, the secular humanist) confronts his own contradictions and limits, recognizing that he has no option but to speak from and within them. Andalusian culture, as both Said's essay and Menocal's far longer book show, is more than the sum of its Muslim, Jewish and Christian parts, more than the monumental edifices of conquest and colonization: Said reminds his readers that Christopher Columbus's grave lies in the Cathedral in Seville, and the Archive of the Indies, that is, the documentation of Spanish imperial expansion, can also be found in the same city. What Said ends up finding in Andalusia, he concludes, is "an earlier version of our own hybrid world, one whose borders were also thresholds, and whose multiple identities formed an enriched diversity"("Andalusia" 5). I have referred above to "Andalusia's Journey" as the missing link between Said's broader work and Spanish imperialism and its legacy. This would mean that here theory is given a chance to travel - albeit not in a leisurely fashion. Said's own theory travels, leading to the same effect he

131

As a way of getting seriously past the weightlessness of one theory after another, the remorseless indignations of orthodoxy, and the expressions of tired advocacy to which we are often submitted, the exercise involved in figuring out where the theory went and how in getting there its fiery core was reignited is invigorating-and is also another voyage, one that is central to intellectual life in the late twentieth century. (452)

Tabea Linhard

'In that Precarious Exilic Realm': Edward Said's Andalusian Journeys

Said's Andalusian journeys prove to be just as invigorating. With his brief text, Said travels like Cervantes' errant knight: these are travels that do not necessarily lead to a particular place, much less a particular home, instead, the traveler's errancy reflects the predicament of a culture that once lived with its contradictions, yet in the early sixteenth century began to violently repress these contradictions. So years before Said travels to Andalusia for the first time, centuries before the particular historical circumstances that shaped the author's life and his writing take place, Don Quixote was already exploring the same precarious exilic realm to which Said refers. ~

Zogoiby family, Boabdil leaves Granada with a Jewish concubine. She steals his crown, which then eventually appears hidden in a synagogue on the island of Goa. Here the protagonist's father, Abraham Zogoiby, finds the ornament. It is later revealed in the novel that this may be just hearsay; instead of locating an almost 500-year-old-crown Abraham Zogoiby has unearthed his mother's well-hidden contraband. As in any Andalusian journey, the reader of this novel is constantly faced with concealed, reinvented and faked identifications. The fact that the novel ends in the Andalusian village of Benengeli-an obvious reference to Don Quixoteis just one of the more obvious semantic games that locates Rushdie's novel somewhere between Andalusia and India. The other issue that connects this novel with Said's Andalusian journeys is the image of the palimpsest, a crucial motive and metaphor in the novel, most evident in the paintings of Aurora Zogoiby, the mother of Mooraes. These paintings depict a magical-realist world in which Granada slowly becomes Bombay. It also is a world filled with magical creatures (monsters, mermaids, ghosts) and also "a cavalcade of local riff-raffpickpockets, pimps, fat whores hitching their saris up against the waves" (226). But more than anything, the lack of clear and solid boundaries between these different worlds, between the tangible and the intangible, the authentic and the fake, is what makes these paintings so important and so relevant to Said's brief yet immensely rich text. The artist herself discusses this "Mooristan" or "Palimpstine" in the following terms:

132

Call it Mooristan

r mentioned in the beginning that any journey to Andalusia should begin with a good story. A story also is appropriate in the Andalusian context because the tradition of the framed narrative, concretely, the Thol/sand and One Nights, is tightly intertwined with the themes of this essay, Andalusia's history, and Edward Said's work. The stories that now are part of the ThaI/sand and One Nights reached Spain in Medieval times, much earlier than Antoine Galland's French translation brought the tales to Europe (Castells and Cinca 5). Both Americo Castro, and later Maria Rosa Menocal have pointed out the ways in which these tales are part and parcel of the Andalusian heritage. 19 The Thol/sand and One Nights, finally, are one of the countless references in what very well may be one of the most complicated and timely novels about what the Andalusian cultural heritage means todayexcept that the novel takes place for most of its plot in twentieth century India. I am referring to The Moor's Last Sigh, by former fatwa-target and recently knighted (if a knight, for sure an errant one) Salman Rushdie. A brief allusion in Said's text might point to Rushdie's novel, yet it also may be a reference to a commonplace within British romanticism: Boabdil's tears as he was forced to leave Granada. 2o Said writes: "The last king of Granada, the luckless Boabdil (Abu Abd Allah Muhammad), was expelled along with the Jews in 1492, weeping or sighing-choose your version. The unhappy Moor quickly became the emblem of what the Arabs had lost" ("Andalusia" 3). In Rushdie's novel, both Boabdil's tears, and Andalusia as a whole are thematized in relation to religious, racial and ethnic conflict, as well as the post-colonial nation-building process in twentieth century India. The title is a reference to Boabdil's last sigh, but also to the novel's main character, Mooraes Zogoiby, or "Moor," who in the text often appears identified with Boabdil. In the novel, and according to the idiosyncratic mythology of the

133

This seaside, this hill, with the fort on top. Water-gardens and hanging gardens, watchtowers and towers of silence too. Place where worlds collide, flow in and out of one another, and washofy away. Place where an air-man can drowno in water, or else grow gills, where a water-creature can get drunk, but also chokeofy, on air. One universe, one dimension, one country, one dream, bumpo'ing into another, or being under, or on top of. (226) Aurora Zogoiby's watery images also correspond to the world Said evokes at the end of his text, a world "whose borders were also thresholds, and whose multiple identities formed and enriched diversity" ("Andalusia" 5). Rushdie's novel makes no attempt to display a particular Andalusian authenticity, hidden underneath the simulacra of commercialism or tourism. Instead, the text questions what the Andalusian heritage means in a global context. Similarly, "Andalusia's Journey" is a tour and more than a tour, a lesson of co-existence and its remainders or shards, and ultimately an endless ghost story, as Carmen's specter continues dancing surrounded by the ruins of al-Andalus.

134

'In that Precarious Exilic Realm': Edward Said's Andalusian Journeys

Tabea Linhard

(Holland & Huggan, viii, also see the introductory chapter to Chris Rojek and John Vrry's Touring Cultures. Transformations of Travel and Theory). In her article "Turistas y viajeros: Experiencia turistica en la narrativa espailola del fin de siglo XX," Eugenia Afinoguenova discusses the shifting distinctions between "travelers" and "tourists" within the Spanish context. Other studies of tourism in contemporary Spain include the forthcoming anthology Spain is (Still) Different: TOl/rist Locations, Attractions. and Discourses in Modern Spanish Culture edited by Eugenia Afinoguenova and Jaume Marti-Olivella. 8 Refcrring to the work of J. Culler and D. MacCannell, Rojek and Urry suggest that "Tourists are semioticians". Tourism, then, would be all about reading, and also consuming the appropriate signs. 9 Thcse include, for example, the "Fundaci6n Tres Culturas" in Seville and the "Casa de Sefarad/Casa de la Memoria" in Cordova. These institutions are known as "centros de interpretacion", that is, they have a didactic purpose: the cultural diffusion of an otherwise silenced memories. Their offerings include guided tours, cultural events (plays and concerts) workshops and classes on topics ranging from history, to cuisine or music, exhibits, activities for children and retail of books, crafts etc. The Junta de Andalucia, the local government, also offers on its web page a number of heritage tours. For more information see http://www.andalucia.org/ 10 See the chapter '''McDisneyization'and 'Post-Tourism': Complementary Perspectives on Contemporary Tourism" in Rojek and Urry, Touring Cultures. Transformations of Travel and Theory. II Monroe summarizes Castro's argument in the following terms: "It would be well to begin with Americo Castro's basic and revolutionary postulate according to which the Celtiberians, Romans and Visigoths who occupied the Peninsula were not Spaniards any more than the Gauls were Frenchmen or the Anglo-Saxons, Englishmen. This postulate, which seems acceptable to most non-Peninsular Europeans and American historians places the rise of Spain as an individual nation at a far later date than that acceptable to most Spanish historians. It also has an important corollary. If Spanishness was something that grew and developed as a result of the Islamic conquest of Hispania, then it follows that Spanish historians need not regret the fact that their nation was "dishonored" by the Arab conquest, since those Peninsular peoples conquered by the Arabs were not yet Spaniards" (Monroe 71-72). 12 This is an intended reference to the author's memoir Out ofPlace. I) Derrida's discussion of the "Mystic Writing Pad" in "Freud and the Scene of Writing" bears resemblance to a palimpsest. This writing implement, nowadays usually available as a toy, allows for a constant erasure of previous writing. The important point here is that the traces of earlier writing remain (partially) visible. The palimpsest, and the writing pad are, at the end, ways to understand the p,roduction of memory. 4 I am referring here to a statement Said makes in the final chapter of Humanism and Democratic Criticism: "The intellectual is perhaps a kind of countermemory, 7

Notes 1 I wish to thank the editors for inviting me to contribute to this volume. I first found out about Said's "Andalusia's Journey" from Marfa Rosa Menocal during a lecture at Washington University in the fall of 2006. Stephanie Kirk's and Mana Fernanda Lander's suggestions were invaluable for the completion of this essay, and I especially appreciate Dr. Lander's idea to look into the origins of Carmen. Errors remain mine alone. 2 My use of violence and tolerance here is a direct reference to the understanding of "convivencia" David Nirenberg espouses in his book Communities of Violence. I will return to Nirenberg's argument later in the text. ) This notion of the spectral is based on Derrida's discussion in Specters of Marx: "It is something that one does not know, precisely, and one does not know if precisely it is, if it exists, if it responds to a name and corresponds to an essence. One does not know: not out of ignorance, but because this non-object, this nonpresent presence, this being-there of an absent or departed no longer belongs to knowledge. At least no longer to that which one thinks one knows by the name of knowledge" (6). 4 This understanding of the Spanish empire draws from Americo Castro's historical thought. Said mentions Castro in "Andalusia's Journey," and I will return to the historian's work later in the essay. James T. Monroe discusses the ways in which Castro recognizes the continuities between the reconquista of Arab Spain and the conquista of the Americas: "the Spanish Empire, with all its extraordinary achievements, would not have been possible as we know it, had not the Spanish people learned how to be religious imperialists from their Muslim enemies" (75). The question wbether the conquest of Iberia starting in 711 was a matter of Islamic religious imperialism is a thorny issue that moves beyond the scope of this essay. The point I would like to emphasize here is that Castro shows that the different events that took place in 1492 are by no means unrelated. Castro's work reveals instead that, "medieval, as well as any aspects of modem Spain, cannot be understood properly if they are separated from the Islamic elements and context that formed so integral a part of them" (Monroe 76). 5 Said cites a few lines from the ode "Eleven Stars over the last Moments of Andalusia" by Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish. For a more elaborate analysis of the text, see Gil Anidjar "Futures of al-Andalus." 6 In "Spanish Orientalism: Uses of the Past in Spain's Colonization of Africa" Ignacio Tofiilo-Quesada explains the ways in which Spanish history in a sense also reveals the limits of Orientalism as a methodology: "Said draws a picture of Western countries that is culturally homogeneous and is not always a fair description of the tensions existing in the metropoles" (142). Moreover, the author also recognizes a paradox which is "at the heart of Spanish Oriental ism, the narrative of a country that Orientalizes and indeed colonizes the Other (... ) but which is described as Oriental itself' (143).

135

136

Tabea Linhard

with its own counterdiscourse that will not allow conscience to look away or fall asleep (142). 15 For an analysis of Arab presence in Spanish literature see Luce Lopez Baralt's Islam in Spanish Literature: from the Middle Ages to the Present (1992) and Daniela Flesler's book The Return of the Moor: North African Immigration in Contemporary Spain (2008). , 16 The name "ladino" was first used to refer to Romance vernacular written in Hebrew characters, and later became the term commonly used to identif'y the language of the Sephardic diaspora. ' 17 Said justifies the need to analyze narrative in the context of colonization and decolonization in the preface of Cultllre and Empire: "Readers of this book will quickly discover that narrative is crucial to my argument here, my basic point being that stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history" (xii). The author explains further: "The power to narrate, or to block narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them. Most important, the grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment mobilized people in the colonial world to rise up and throw off imperial subjection; in the process, many Europeans and Americans were stirred by these stories and their protagonists, and they too fought for new narratives of equality and human community"(xiii). 18 Nirenberg's book proposes a different vision of convivencia than Menocal's text. The respective studies also tackle different locations, the Crown and Aragon and the South of France (Nirenberg), and Andalusia during the reign of the Umayyads (Menocal). Nirenberg is a historian, and Menocal a literary scholar. Yet in spite of their differences, the books still share a close eye for the contradictions, and both escape teleological narratives and easy explanations of the end of convivencia. 19 Castro explains in "Spanish Civilization:" "Beginning with the Oriental tales, the genius of Castile cultivated novelistic forms throughout the centuries. The Celestina and Lazarillo de Tormes represent prior stages in this development of the genre before the Quixote. With Cervantes the novel reaches its height of perfection and is harvested by universal literature" (35). According to Menocal, the stories of these traveling tales lead to and from al-Andalus, connecting the stories again to her notion of a culture of tolerance. She writes: "Petrus Alfonsi brought frame tale tradition to Latin Europe, followed by other collectors and translators from Andalusia. If the frames of these works characteristically present some sort of tyranny-direct or indirect echoes of Scheherazade's plight-the tales within them embody the hope that stories can bring, since by their very nature they resist clearcut interpretations and are likely to reveal the different ways in which truths and realities can be perceived. In its insistence that the point of stories, of literature, is to pose difficult questions rather than to propose easy answers or facile morale, this tradition is a central part of the Andalusian legacy to subsequent European culture" (274).

'In that Precarious Exilic Realm': Edward Said's Andalusian Journeys

137

20 for an analysis of the use of Granada and Boabdil's last sigh as a trope in British Romantic literature, see Saglia's article.

Works Cited Afinoguenova, Eugenia. "Turistas y viajeros: Experiencia turistica en la narrativa espanola del fm del siglo XX." Revista de Estudios Hispanicos. 35.2 (2001 May): 281-92. Anidjar, Gil. "Futures ofal-Andalus." Journal ofSpanish Cultural Studies. 7.3 (2006): 225-239. Beck, Rudolf. "'The Re-Discovery of India': Palimpsest, Multiplicity and Melodrama in The Moor's Last Sigh. New Worlds: Discovering and Constructing the Unknown in Anglophone Literature. Ed. Martin Kuester et al. Munich, Vogel, 2000. 17-33. Castro, Americo. "The meaning of Spanish civilization." Americo Castro and the Meaning of Spanish Civilization. Ed. Jose Rubia Barcia and Selma Margaretten. Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1976.2340 Childers, William. Transnational Cervantes. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Clark, Robert L.A. "South of North: Carmen and French Nationalisms." East of West. Cross-cultural Performance and the Staging of Difference. New York: Palgrave, 2000. 187-216. Cinca Pinos, Dolors and Margarita Castells Criballes. Las mil y una naches: segUn el manuscrito mas antiguo conocido. Barcelona: Destino, 1998. Curtis, Barry and Claire Pajaczkowska. '''Getting There': Travel, Time and Narrative." Traveller's Tales. Narratives of Home and Displacement. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. 199-215. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Karnuf. New York and London: Routledge, 1994. -. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Holland, Patrick and Graham Huggan. Tourists with Typewriters. Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998. LopeZ-Saralt, Luce. Islam in Spanish Literature: From the Middle Ages to the Present. Trans. Andrew Hurley. San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1992

138

Tabea Linhard

Loureiro, Angel. "Spanish Nationalism and the Ghost of Empire." Journal ofSpanish Cultural Studies, 4.1 (2003): 65-76. Menocal, Maria Rosa. The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. Boston: Little, Brown, 2002. Monroe. James T. The Hispano-Arabic World. Americo Castro and the Meaning of Spanish Civilization. Ed. Jose Rubia Barcia and Seln1a Margaretten. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. 69-90. Nirenberg, David. Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities -in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996. Rojek, Chris and John Urry. Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Rushdie, Salman. The Moor's Last Sigh. New York: Pantheon Books, 1995. Saglia, Diego. "The Moor's Last Sigh: Spanish-Moorish Exoticism and the Gender of History in British Romantic Poetry." Journal ofEnglish Studies 3, (2001-2002): 193-215 Said, Edward. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. - . "Andalusia's Journey." Travel + Leisure. (December 2002). 1-5 - . "Traveling Theory Reconsidered." Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. 436-452. -. Representations of the Intellectual. The 1993 Reith Lectures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994. - . Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993. - . "Traveling Theory." The World. the Text and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983. Tofino-Quesada, Ignacio. "Spanish Orientalism: Uses of the Past in Spain's Colonization in Africa." Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 23. 1-2 (2003): 141-48

PART II:

AFFIRMING HUMANISM: SECULAR CRITICISM AND DEMOCRATIC PRAXIS

Said and Secularism

CHAPTER FIVE SAID AND SECULARISM BRUCE ROBBINS

Edward Said was my teacher before the publication of Orientalism, when he was best known as a critical advocate of so-called "French theory." Some years later he became a friend and mentor who, it is not too much to say, saved my life, professionally speaking and more than professionally speaking. lowe him a personal debt, therefore, and a debt that is probably larger than anyone should ideally owe anyone else. As a result of this debt, there were complications to our friendship. You will be relieved to know that I do not intend to discuss those complications. But I do want to speak on the assumption that, to some extent at least, these complications can be generalized-in other words, that for all of us who share a collective debt to Edward Said, as a heroic example and a sort of ideal, this debt is not a simple thing to service or sustain, to live up to or know what to do with. Among the many tributes to Edward Said since his death in 2003, one of the most moving was the moment at his funeral in New York when his son Wadie spoke bravely and humorously about the difficulty of belonging to the next generation, about what a hard act his father is to follow. This was a confession, yet it allowed for movement from the personal to the general-for example, in Wadie's afterword to his father's book From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map. "The amazing memory that I am left with," Wadie writes, "is his dedication to the idea of speaking out and staying informed, no matter how sick or infirm he was" (302). Beyond everything that can be said about the genius Edward Said brought to the acts ofreading and writing, there is the simple fact of effort-effort under circumstances of illness so oppressive that even so everyday an action as "staying informed," or staying informed enough to "speak out" with authority, was indeed a piece of amazing heroism. Unlike genius, effort

141

can in principle be successfully emulated. When we admire an effort, we accept a responsibility to try to emulate it. Yet there is of course a sense in which admiration, as it rises to ever-greater intensities of praise, seems designed on the contrary to leave us lesser creatures much too satisfied with our failure to emulate, a failure that the magnitude of the praise suggests may be inevitable. I cannot imagine that Edward Said would be pleased with this legacy: too much admiration, not enough effort. Still, some part of me wants to blame Said for this dilemma. After all, it was in part his modesty that prevented him from theorizing his own achievement in such a way that other people might be able to assess the possibility or practicality of following even a short distance in his footsteps. In his book Representations of the Intellectual, he holds fast to the tradition of Julien Benda, a tradition according to which the intellectual is (as Said described himself in his memoir) "out of place," an isolated, unaffiliated speaker of truth to power. In this tradition, the successful enactment of an intellectual vocation is obliged to present itself as an unsolved mystery, indeed an insoluble one. For explanation of where any given intellectual comes from and why power would ever listen to her or him could only emerge via scrutiny of actions and affiliations-for example, Said's achievements in the academy and his affiliations with the Palestinian people-that take their meaning from the given context. By Said's account, however, the particular context by which his achievements were ratified (scholarly institutions) and the partiality implied by his own affiliations (e.g. some special degree of loyalty to the project of Palestinian nationhood) must be allowed no part whatsoever in the definition of the intellectual, which demands an ideal spiritual purity. If to be an intellectual is to enter into a sort of absolute, almost monastic exile, then belonging of any kind is grounds for instant loss of accreditation. As Stefan Collini points out, "for Said the preoccupying dialectic is that between 'purity' and 'contamination'" (432). Like Benda, that is, Said defines intellectuals in such a way that the charge of trahison will be applicable always and everywhere. For all intellectuals can do, when seen as participants in the actual institutions of their time and place, is appear to betray their impossibly pure ideal, or else threaten to disappear as a category. Disappearance and betrayal were what Said himself most often saw around him. The two words sum up many of his often harsh observations concerning intellectuals and their willingness to accept their professionalization or domestication.! Those of us who admire Said and seek after our fashion to emulate him need more encouragement than this. For most of us most of the time, even without illness, merely "staying informed" seems strenuous and almost

Bruce Robbins

Said and Secularism

prohibitively exhausting. The lonely exilic hero speaking truth to power is only with difficul ty imagined doing the everyday things that exhaust and preoccupy us: feeding the baby, or taking out the trash, or for that matter grading a stack of papers. Intellectuals have been so persistently imagined as masculine precisely because they have been imagined as instances of a more generally valued autonomy-ideal versions of the so-called liberal humanist subject (Kaplan 1996). But we cannot rest content with the~ assumption that someone else, probably female, is doing all the work necessary to the maintenance of biological and familial life, that intellectuals ought to have no children (a highly charged theme in Said's Beginnings) or will enjoy the financial means to hire servants for childrearing. Nor can we flatter ourselves that if we speak up, we will have done our part and satisfied all ethical obligations, whether or not the world and its powers (which we have no obligation to inspect too closely) decide to recognize that anything significant has been said or done. Whatever the risk of de-mystification or de-cathexis, then, a proper theory of the intellectual would seem to require more detail about the social field from which intellectual activity emerges and where it has (or does not have) its effects. Fewer portraits of the intellectual, more landscapes around the intellectual. Which is to say, less imagining of the intellectual as constitutively homeless. Given the conceptual framework that Said sets up around the intellectual, there has been an irresistible temptation to raise the charge of betrayal-that is, of unconscious social belonging-about Said himself. One recent and emphatic example is Gil Anidjar's essay "Secularism." Anidjar's indictment, which first avoids naming Said (there is no colon, no subtitle) and then makes him personally and perfectly representative of its titular concept, takes us to the heart of this volume's concerns. As I have noted, Said offers the homeless intellectual as a model for the normative subject. Homeless is what he teaches us to want to be. The putative advantages of homelessness can fit into different vocabularies: for example, hybridity (the perspective gained from multiple affiliations with no single center) or humanism (critical distance and impartiality). But Said's preferred personal term of self-description, and perhaps the one that best indicates what his avowed humanism means to him, is "secular." The introductory chapter of The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983) lays out a brief for what Said calls "Secular Criticism." In case the point has been missed, the book's conclusion, summing up its values throughout, is entitled "Religious Criticism." There, Said observes "a dramatic increase in the number of appeals to the extrahuman, the vague abstraction, the divine, the esoteric, and secret" (291). Religion has "returned," he

Suggests, as a result of "exhaustion, consolation, disappointment" among intellectuals. It appears in the form of a "Manichean theologizing of 'the Other'" as well as a cult of "unthinkability, undecidability, and paradox" (29 I). Against all this (much of it clearly targeting the explicit antihumanism of French theory), he marshals a secularism derived from Vico: "what human beings can know is only what they have made" (291). This secularism contains quite diverse components-a preference for empirical particulars over abstract generalizations, for example, is by no means the same thing as "a healthy skepticism about the various official idols venerated by culture and by system" (290). But the key to Said's secularism, as I have argued elsewhere (Robbins 1994), is the conjoined refusals of "the need for certainty," on the one hand, and of "group solidarity, and a sense of communal belonging" (290), on the other. Though he assumes it is still available as pejorative metaphor (something that in today's climate has become even more questionable), Said does not take religion itself as his prime target. His target seems to be social membership. Any surrender to sociality, he suggests, will undermine the proper independence of critical knowledge. Belonging as such implies dogmatism. Religiosity, in Said's lexicon, is a compound of both. Criticism can only be secular if it takes nothing as sacred, submits to no certainties. And it can reject certainties only if it also rejects "group solidarity" and "a sense of communal belonging." This credo of course restates in the vocabulary of the sacred and the secular what Said elsewhere puts into a geographical figure: the sacred is being at home, the secular is being in exile. Anidjar's main argument is that Said's secularism on the contrary makes him all too much at home-at home in Western culture. Secularism for Anidjar is not just a Western ideology, but the particular ideology that Sponsors the West's constitutive aggression toward the non-West. When Said participates in "the general movement of opposition to religion carried by the terms secular and secularism," he appears "simply to have forgotten the lesson taught by this most important of books, namely, Orientalism. For if Orientalism teaches us anything, it is that Orientalism is secularism" (56). To Anidjar, Said's espousal of secularism makes him not a critic of the West, but one of its most insidious propagandists. Thus, despite Said's scathing opinion of Naipaul (Said, Reflections 98-104), he becomes fair game for satiric descriptions like Rob Nixon's of that other self-proclaimed exile: "secure, esteemed, and integrated into the high culture of the metropolis, asserting his homelessness, while considerable numbers of genuinely disowned people battle to be acknowledged as legitimate members of the society he is at liberty to reject rhetorically

142

143

Bruce Robbins

Said and Secularism

though he depends on it in every way" (Nixon, "London" 32). Anidjar denies accordingly that Said's commitment to secularism is oppositional. On the contrary:

belonging is to claim a spiritual state that is truly not of this world. Why would we not think of it as a version of the sacred? I don't remember anyone pointing out, though I may simply have missed it, that spirituality is an essential assumption behind the famous words that Said repeatedly quotes as a critical and cosmopolitan manifesto: "The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land" (Said, Reflections 185). Hugh of St Victor, the author of these sentences, was a monk living in the Catholic Europe of the twelfth century. Could he have embraced this absolute homelessness if he were not silently sustained by a sense of belonging on another level, by faith in a higher, otherworldly home? It seems plausible that Said's cosmopolitanism, though defiantly worldly, is similarly sustained by sources of authority that go unmentioned. Taken abstractly, Anidjar's argument is that while Said thinks he is in exile, he is actually a member, and that his membership empowers him. The all-powerful entities to which Anidjar thinks Said belongs-secularism, Christianity, and "the West"-may not offer the most precise explanation of the particular power Said came to wield, but the abstract point about Said's belonging and its authority seems right. At any rate, it is only on these terms-taking secularism not as exile, but as a form of affiliation-that Said can be defended as a secular critic. Such a defense would involve qualifying some of secularism's claims as Said articulates them. It could be described as a secularizing of secularism, an expression that positions the secular as both a conceptual object in need of improvement and the conceptual subject called upon to perform that improvement-that is, seen as worthy of performing it. Having made this concession, is it still acceptable to pronounce the term "theological" about a style of argument of which one disapproves? I think it is. Consider the account of secularism that Anidjar provides. Where does secularism come from? As Anidjar tells the story, it comes from "one particular religion" (59), namely Christianity. Christianity invents both religion (as a category) and non-religion, or secularism. Christianity's powers of invention are all but miraculous. It does not seem too much to say that, in its overwhelming superiority to all other historical actors (there are none in Anidjar's story), it behaves like a monotheistic god. It is the source of everything and its opposite. The structure of the sentences leaves room for no other subject, whether grammatically or historically. Christianity "actively disenchanted its own world by dividing itself into private and public, politics and economics, indeed, religious and secular. And Christianity turned against itself in a complex and ambivalent

144

Said was oppositional to the extent that he was only attacking victorious causes. And-is this really news?-secularism is a victorious cause. It participates in a set of devices that make religion (the religion of the others, that is, or their nationalism, primitivism, militarism, and terrorism) more of an ominous danger than, say, the dealings of the ruling and nolonger welfare states, the practices of giant corporations and their national ' and intemational backing, to say nothing of homeland security and its consequences...Secularism continues to be fostered by the same institutions and structurally identical elites, who work out of the same centers of power that earlier spread their "civilization" and continue to expand their mission, be it economic, military, cultural, humanitarian even. It still has the bigger bombs-it is the history of bombing. (64-65) As a champion of secularism, Said becomes for Anidjar not just a Westerner but an Orientalist, and not just an Orientalist but (if the somewhat hysterical tone here allows the words to be taken as meaning what they say) a state terrorist actively supporting aerial bombardment. It is tempting to read this accusation as simply another symptom of the irrationalism that Said called religious criticism. The passage could almost be said to act out an abandonment of secular rationality. For as it gathers momentum, it flings away reason's tools-self-reflection, qualification, access to a spectrum of differentiated categories and causal relations-and resolves itself into a single brutally assertive act of predication. The finger points, jabbing for emphasis: X is Y. Anidjar needs the repeated italicized is because, like the Orwellian assertion that war is peace, his argument has a great deal of rational skepticism to overthrow. An ordinary reader, even a sympathetic one, is likely to think that the relations between X (Said's secularism) and Y (the history of bombing) are somewhat more complicated than simple equivalence. The drastic simplification, implying that responsibility for all the ills of the world can be located in one collective subject, even a subject as vast and easy to malign as "the West," seems a good example of the "impossibly huge generalizations" (Said, World 291) that Said offers as instances of "uncritical religiosity" (292). Yet if so, then Said's account of secularism might also be accused of uncritical religiosity. For in its strongest self-description, as I have noted, it refuses to admit that it too constitutes a worldly form of belonging and suffers necessarily from the imperfection appertaining thereto. To claim for the intellectual an absolute and mysterious separation from all human

145

146

Bruce Robbins

series of parallel movements, continuous gestures and rituals,...slowly coming to name that to which it ultimately claimed to oppose itself: religion. Munchausen-like, it attempted to liberate itself, to extricate itself from its own conditions; it judged itself no longer Christian, no longer religious. Christianity...reincarnated itself as secular" (59-60). These are the actions of a Subject so transcendental that no other appellation will do: in Anidjar's account, it acts like a deity. No actions are mentioned thal could be the work of any other subject whatsoever. Anidjar does not pause to mention the Greeks, for example, though for both Nietzsche and Foucault, Greece added to the mix of Western ideas something that remained significantly if not completely alien to Christianity. And the Jews and the Muslims, who are mentioned-in whose name, indeed, Anidjar seems to write-appear only as victimized objects, not as subjects: "religion is the Orient, the imperial realm to be governed and dominated, bombed, reformed, and civilized" (66). Again, italics are brought in to enforce the otherwise implausible notion that anyone actor can fill all the available space, leaving everyone else no choice but to be acted upon. Christianity does have a human side: it does Adam's job of the naming of species. But its power to maintain itself in its essential identity as Christianity even while transforming itself into its opposite, secularism, can hardly be described as anything less than divine: "secularism is a name Christianity gave itself when it invented religion, when it named its other or others as religions" (62). Secularism then became "the means by which Christianity forgot andforgave itself' (63). For this style of argument too, of course, Said himself could be held 2 accountable, at least in the eyes of his critics. This model of ambitious spatial and temporal totalizing could never have attained its present pervasiveness without the help of Orientalism. As Aijaz Ahmad puts it, Said visibly surpasses even his master Foucault in the scale of his temporal generalization: "the idea that there could be a discourse-that is to say, an epistemic construction-traversing the whole breadth of 'Western' history and textualities, spanning not only the modem capitalist period but all the preceding pre-capitalist periods as well, is not only an un-Marxist but also a radically un-Foucauldian idea" (166). This is a reason why, Ahmad goes on, "the only voices we encounter in the book are precisely those of the very Western canonicity which, as Said complains, has always silenced the Orient" (172). And it is why the book could suggest, going far beyond the mere historical record, that "Europeans were ontologically incapable of producing any true knowledge about non-Europe" (178). In short, it is why Said can be accused of "his own essentializing of 'the West'" (183). Even readers who

Said and Secularism

147

are largely sympathetic to the argument of Orientalism sometimes complain that in Said's account the Third World itself has no agency, while "the West" is a well-nigh omnipotent cause, responsible for all visible effects. In this sense, the argument of Orientalism can itself be called theological. Thus Anidjar, unembarrassed to march under the banner of theology, can appropriate both Orientalism and "Orientalism" as his own-Qn the one hand, Said's critique of generalizing, on the other the practice of generalizing itself (this time about "the West"). The strategy of enlisting Said the author of Orientalism against Said the champion of secularism seizes upon a genuine vulnerability. More might be said about Orientalism and the degree to which it has quietly protected itself against such hostile takeovers. But I am more concerned here with Said's secularist credo as such, without regard for whether or not it is embodied in his most famous book. If aspects of Orientalism have to be jettisoned in order to mount a proper defense of Said's secularism, so be it. In a perceptive review-essay about the book Occidentalism by Ian Suruma and Avishai Margalit, Akeel Bilgrami argues that so-called Occidentalism-the set of critiques that generalize about the West as freely and disparagingly as Orientalism generalizes about the non-Westis not truly symmetrical and does not deserve the same dismissal (Bilgrami 2006). The key reason is power. The three defining features of Orientalism (civilizational condescension, stereotyping, and exoticism) "owed their influence in more or less subtle ways to the proximity of such writing...to metropolitan sites of political and economic power" (389). A fourth feature, the fact that the first three are phenomena of the canonical mainstream rather than some eccentric fringe, likewise expresses "the deep links that writing has to power" (389). The "absolutely crucial" difference between Orientalism and Occidentalism is that in the latter the discourse's link to power is absent: "the enemies of the West who are presented in this book, far from being close to power, are motivated by their powerlessness and helplessness against Western power and domination" (390). In short, the presence or absence of power is decisive. As a practical political judgment, this is a helpful reminder. The same ideas should not be acted on in the same way when they are spoken by the POwerful and when they are spoken by the powerless. Nationalism, to give the obvious example, is not the same idea in the mouth of a Palestinian who has been denied a state and an American whose state has a habit of trying to bomb others into submission. But there is a danger in allowing Power to divide the world in two. This clear-cut division does not help the reader figure out where she or he stands in the much murkier zone where

Bruce Robbins

Said and Secularism

most political actions are taken, a zone in which it is necessary to talk in kinds and degrees of power, not about power's simple absence or presence. The power-based distinction between Orientalism and accidentalism does not invite us to think of ourselves as political actors, which is to say as possessors and potential users of power. To possess and use power is what it means to act politically. Before one can decide what is to be done to redistribute power, one must know what power one possesses. To imagine that one has no power and-a special temptation in the humanities-that one's virtue depends on being careful not to obtain any is not only self-serving self-blindness; it is also a convenient means of taking oneself outside the sphere of politics completely. Said's secularism, as I've noted, sometimes trips over this point, implicitly claiming a virtuous powerlessness as an unspoken corollary of the claim to homelessness. l The secularizing of secularism entails abandoning this claim. What I will suggest here is that this secularizing can be shown to happen in Said's own writing. The key to this argument is the term with which I began: effort. The term effort is of course associated with Said's humanist impulse. His early writings suggested that French anti-humanism gave too little importance to matters of intention, will, awareness, and free choice. When he speaks of Foucault, Said sets effort (which implies a certain freedom) against power (which sometimes seems to be no freedom, all constraint). As it turns out, however, the terms have both a genealogical and a conceptual intimacy. The first definition of effort given in the Oxford English Dictionary is simply "power." This definition is described as obsolete, but the current meaning is contiguous with it: "a strenuous putting forth of power." Effort, in other words, is the display of a power within that is in some way comparable or commensurate to the power without that it confronts. Said often seems to present himself as lacking or exterior to power, especially in his critiques of poststructuralism. But his repeated, insistent use of the word effort testifies on the contrary to a halfrecognized participation in power. Somewhat surprisingly, then, Said's commitment to effort takes him away from those who align him in an uncomplicated way with humanism. Well before his death, one could detect a tendency to lament his forays into literary theory as misguided and finally inessential to his project, a project for which humanism was the one genuinely necessary resource (Bilgrami 2004). Tariq Ali, speaking of the influence of Michel Foucault on Orientalism, adds the word "alas" (8). When Said says that "history does not get made without work, intention, resistance, effort, or conflict," he is indeed suggesting that the freedom of the critic or intellectual to

resist, to formulate an intention, to make an effort is a freedom for which there is no room in, say, Foucault's "micronetworks of power" (Said, World 245). In the same work religious criticism is described as "shutting off human investigation, criticism, and effort in deference to the authority of the more-than-human, the supernatural, the other-worldly" (290, emphasis added). Those who notice his use of the word effort tend to praise Said, in terms he himself invited, as a fundamentally anti-systemic thinker, where "system" is a codeword for the French theory-builders. Thus Abdirahman Hussein suggests that Said troubled other people's wisdom instead of offering any systematic wisdom of his own, rejecting methodology in order to be "open-ended" (4). I will not insist here on how far his work is from the banal, toothless liberalism for which such accounts seem to be preparing him. Nor will I do more than mention the pro-systemic side of Said's work, which is obvious enough in its influence on Anidjar and elsewhere. In dialogue with Ali in 1994, Said described the genesis of his book Orientalism as a discovery that "distortions and misrepresentations [of the Arabs in Western discourse] were systematic, part of a much larger system of thought that was endemic to the West's whole enterprise of dealing with the Arab world" (Ali 62). Orientalism may not have allowed enough room for exceptions and discriminations, but this fundamental insight is surely correct. My question is whether Said in fact imagines system on a theological model-whether his sense of what sort of enemy we are up against permits any simple distinction between system and anti-system, humanism and anti-humanism. His use of the word effort seems to resist such classification. Talking about the popular impression of symmetry between the two sides in the Middle East, "as if each side had a side, a piece of land, a territory from which to face the other" (Said, "Palestine" 9), an impression of symmetry that persisted even into the Second Intifada, Said described this "skewed picture" as "kept in place as a result of human effort" (9). Said's readers will recognize here one of his characteristically and wonderfully counter-intuitive phrasings. The idea of valued accomplishment that we usually attach to great works of art, which are normally esteemed as the result of a successful expenditure of "human effort," is here presented instead as an attribute of the evils against which We struggle. The language of effort, which cannot be subtracted from our praise of Edward Said, is especially characteristic of his writing when he refuses to decide whether or not he wants to praise, or whether the Jnoment is right for either praise or blame. In his contribution to an anthology called The Landscape of Palestine, he speaks of a "nationalist effort premised on the need to construct a desirable loyalty to and insider's

148

149

150

Bruce Robbins

knowledge of one's country, tradition, and faith" (4, emphasis added). The examples here happen to come from the US and Israel, so his refusal to join the "nationalist effort" makes political sense. And yet the same studied neutrality re-appears, later in the essay, when he turns instead to the Palestinians. The language of effort seems to be a common denominator, shared by both sides, and in itself offering no clues as to which side we should take. Arriving at the Palestinians, he speaks of their collective memory in neutral, processual, constructionist terms that might apply equally well to Orientalism: as "a field of activity in which past events are selected, reconstructed, maintained, modified, and endowed with political meaning" (13). What he calls the "dialectic of memory over territory" (9) seems to work equally well for nationalism, on the one hand, and for imperialism, on the other. All the force of his intelligence seems concentrated on the goal of not dividing those isms from each other easily or prematurely. Said assumes, Hussein writes, that "what has been labeled as 'normal,' 'ideal,' 'natural' or 'commonsensical' in a given cultural or historical conjuncture has achieved that privileged status in virtue of the vast amount of concerted effort invested in its behalf by individuals, institutions, and indeed entire societies" (7). But note how Said's phrasing differs distinctively from the constructionist commonplace that what has been made by people can be changed by people. Said is saying this too, of course. But to use the term effort as repeatedly as Said does is to put extra stress on the common ground between Hussein's list-a list of things that are all assumed to need changing-and the "positive" terms that Hussein does not mention, including projects of change themselves. They too are products of effort. To use the same word about both, as Said so pointedly does, is to step outside of humanism, at least to the extent that humanism is always tempted by a scholarly open-mindedness that leaves the impact of its knowledge out of account and thus subtly or not so subtly rules out the choosing of political sides. If the identification of secularism with exile threatens to take Said out of politics, his habit of speaking in terms of effort acknowledges an inevitable participation in power, hence takes him back into the domain of the political. I am not suggesting that there was ever any doubt about Said's commitment to the cause of Palestinian statehood or to a liberatory politics generally. Among the many intellectuals who speak in the name of politics, Said has of course become a landmark, unique in his generation, standing out from all by virtue of his unfailing courage, energy, vision, and scrupulousness. Nor am I pretending that an everyday term like effort offers a definitive reconciliation of the conceptual strains that animated so

Said and Secularism

151

much of his work. There was always an obvious tension between Said's credo of intellectual detachment and the political struggle to retrieve a Palestinian homeland. Was exile a desirable condition, necessary to the most rigorous intellectual endeavor? Or was it the regrettable result of a particular dispossession, something that could and should be made right by a return to a literal or metaphorical homeland-that should and would disappear with, say, the creation of a viable Palestinian state? 4 Part of the secret of Said's charismatic presence is that he seemed to solve in his own being a paradox or contradiction for which there is perhaps no purely intellectual resolution. But there was also a degree of coherence between his contradictions and those that beset the Palestinians as a group. In The Question ofPalestine, as I noted in a review, Said suggests with a mixture of boldness and resignation that "the Palestinian experience has been one of homelessness, and in a sense it will remain one of homelessness, the homelessness that Said offers as the proper condition of criticism. As he says, 'the conservative version of the Palestinian quest is both historically and morally intolerable: the idea that we can all go back to 1948, to our property, to an Arab country' [Said, Question 167]. When it comes, the Palestinian state will be a new construction on a new site" (Robbins, "Homelessness" 70-71). When the PLO, then the Palestinian Authority, accepted the principle of a state to be located on the West Bank and Gaza, that is, they were asking the Palestinians "to start thinking not in terms of the homes and property they had lost irrevocably to Israel, but in terms of new political gains" (Said, Question 224). Whether what is pushed for in Israel/Palestine is one secular democratic state or two, what is demanded of both the Palestinians and the Israelis will be to give up some of what they feel is theirs, what they feel they are owed. Here once again the word secular can be understood neither as a disguise for imperialist Christianity nor as the literal antithesis of religion as such. To speak of a secular democratic state, as Said did, is to use the word secular so as to reactivate its impulse of detachment-from the land, from the past, from belief in the strong sense, from belonging in the strong sense-not just as part of an ideal of critical writing, but as essential to a pragmatic engagement with politics, an engagement whose stakes and substance are precisely the land, the past, belief and belonging. Said's persistent use of the word effort itself represents an effort on his part: an effort to win recognition for accomplishments that do not achieve perfection or closure, including his own; and an effort to recognize power as something possessed and used rather than something whose lack can serve as a mark of virtue. This latter point is one that scholars, who tend to pride themselves on their marginality, may need to be informed about

152

Bruce Robbins

more than non-scholars. How should we scholars take it, then, when literary critic Giles Gunn describes Said as "the conscience of our profession"? (71). On one level, this is perhaps no more than the truth. But if so, it is a very intriguing truth. What does it suggest about the relations between virtue, effort, and power? Said's own view of the academic profession is often unsparing. Orientalism and Eurocentrism, as Said describes them, often seem too deeply entrenched in the assumptions and practices of the American academy for that academy to be imagined as ever taking the author of Orientalism as its conscience, let alone doing so within a decade or two of Orientalism's publication. Why should our profession have accepted his rebuke to its Eurocentrism and narrow nationalism? If criticism is, as Said wrote in 1983, "an academic thing, located for the most part far away from the questions that trouble the reader of a daily newspaper," if it is "an institution for publicly affirming the values of our, that is, European dominant elite culture," then why should it have embraced Edward Said's judgment of it? The question is crucial. If we do not ask it, our praise of Edward Said's accomplishment risks sounding empty at the core, for we will have refused to consider exactly what he was and was not up against, as well as what we ourselves are and are not up against. The answer clearly does not lie with what one might call Said's incidental humanism-his willingness to extend a magnanimous, somewhat unfocused respect to classic texts and favorite critics, pretending their value utterly transcended their time and place, refusing to blame them for the complicity with Eurocentrism or imperialism in which he nonetheless took some pains to catch and expose them. The sportsmanlike gesture might have reassured some scholars, but it would not have caught and held their attention in the first place. The professional conscience could only have been activated, I think, by the blame itself. According to Gunn, Said knew "that there is nothing strictly speaking innocent either about the act of writing or the act of reading" (71). There is an extra level to these words. When Said accused literature, our professional object of knowledge, of guilty complicity in imperialism, he seemed to threaten the value of professional attention to literature. But one might also say that this accusation paradoxically increased literature's social meaningfulness-a meaningfulness that has been exposed to everincreasing doubt. Even if literature or discourse is serving the devil, or especially because it is serving the devil, it becomes important. It makes things happen. It needs to be taken into consideration. Hence the charge might be greeted by the more perceptive of his fellow professionals as a sort of gift. In accepting Edward Said's accusation, and thus accepting

Said and Secularism

153

him as their conscience, the humanities were also accepting an enormous and lucrative contract for further work. And not merely work, but work recognized to be socially meaningful. In other words, Said was embraced by the institutions about which he had so little good to say because when he said bad things about them, he was implying that they possessed a kind of power. The success of Orientalism can only be explained by the fact that the book attributed so much power to writing, to knowledge, to discourse-in short, to the stock in trade of academics. Said argued of course that this power was serving the worst possible ends. But set against the alternative of powerless irrelevance, the option of blameworthy significance looks quite attractive. Especially if one can simultaneously occupy the position of the (self)blamer-that is, the critic. I would argue that Said's success in the academy disproves his argument about the academy. But this does not leave us with an idealization of the academy any more than with a simple repudiation of it. When critics in the Amoldian humanist line claim for themselves an ideal disinterestedness, they invite the charge that such a claim (like that of humanitarianism) is of course also to some extent self-interested. What is one to make then of Said's emendation of the humanist position? Is it entirely self-interested to repudiate disinterestedness (detachment, exile) and to acknowledge one's self-interest? Perhaps not. At any rate, the question indicates an indispensable moral messiness that is part of the payoff for Said's insistence that the academy is a channel of power. Surrender our ostensible moral purity, he enjoins us, and we can win some purchase on the world. If the secular has threatened to propose an otherworldly model of exilic innocence, this would count as a secularization of the secular. Nubar Hovsepian nicely describes Zionism as "encumbered with Palestinians" (II). In this sense, Said forces us to think of secularism too as properly "encumbered"--encumbered by the power it possesses as well as by the powers it is up against. What power should we then attribute to the secular? For Anidjar, as cited above, secularism is a "victorious cause," fully, even divinely empowered. For Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, on the other hand, the willingness of scholars to believe secularism has triumphed is itself as mysterious as popular adherence to the most groundless of superstitions. "The modem liberal subject": by now it seems, or ought to seem, anything but an obvious choice as the unique terminus ad quem of historical narrative. Where are all these supposed modern liberal subjects? I daily encounter graduate students who are dab hands at unveiling the hidden historical violences that underlie a secular, universalist liberal humanism.

154

Bruce Robbins

Said and Secularism

Yet these students' sentient years, unlike the fonnative years of their teachers, have been spent entirely in a xenophobic Reagan-Bush-ClintonBush America where "liberal" is, if anything, a taboo category and where "secular humanism" is routinely treated as a marginal religious sect, while a vast majority of the population claims to engage in direct intercourse with multiple invisible entities such as angels, Satan, and God (Sedgwick 2003, 139-140).

includes such large questions as what kind of empire George Bush is currently leading (strong or weak) and how far American imperialism does or does not coincide with global capitalism. But the single largest thing he has to say about it is that this is the question that must be asked, and asked again and again. For there are no superhuman beings, angelic or satanic, from which we can take our bearings once and for all. We are not authorized to relax. Secularism is all about effort. Said could have sUlmned up his secular commitment in Derrida's well-chosen words, "Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort."

I recognize Sedgwick's world much more readily than I do Anidjar's. And my understanding of what Said called "worldliness" suggests that in this time and place, some of our most urgent intellectual tasks must be guided by observations, like Sedgwick's, of the actual state of the electorate. Yet Said was of course not a narrow-minded pragmatist who thought only in the short term-if he had been, the disappointments of Middle Eastern politics might well have destroyed him well before his untimely death. Nor did he allow his intellectual agenda to be dumbed down to suit the crude demystificatory needs (important as these are) of a radically incomplete Enlightenment project. I have been trying to suggest in this essay that one cannot simply identify Said's secularism with his humanism. Appearances to the contrary, Said's appeals to effort are ways of mediating between humanism and poststructuralism, opening each up to the other. To see effort as power and to translate movements and institutions into the shocking neutrality of historical efforts is to come closer to Foucault's postulate of ubiquitous power than any humanist is comfortable with. It is also to set up a systemic indeterminacy that overlaps with that of Derrida. A world full of efforts comes dangerously close in its lack of moral criteria or epistemological guidelines to a world full of acts of faith, a world where it is hard to separate off political commitment from superstition. In exhorting Western-located intellectuals to transcend the unthinking chauvinism hidden away in disciplinary comfort zones and innocent-seeming habits of interpretation, Said asked us in effect to submit ourselves to a practice of modernist estrangement, a worldly version of asceticism. Was this a spiritual practice, or a secular one? Said wanted it to be the laUer, just as he wanted to be able to distinguish superstitions (including those of his fellow scholars) from commitments. What he bequeaths us is his worldly desire, a desire both for secularism and for its (further) secularization. What sort of effort is required, and where precisely should the effort be focused, in order to change that which must be changed in the world? Said had and has a great deal to say on this all-important subject, which

155

Notes See my "The East is a Career: Edward Said and the Logics of Professionalism" in Edward Said: A Critical Reader (1992). 1 Anidjar adds that Christianity is sometimes "inchoate, unintentional" (60) and does not always act "knowingly" (61). So it may be functionally ubiquitous and omnipotent, but it is not quite omniscient. 3 What Said seems to resent so much in Orwell, for example, is less his not unwilling exploitation in the Cold War than the faked or wannabe homelessness that launched his early career: the fact that, whether among the Bunnese, the miners of the North, or the tramps of the South, he always knew that he could return. In an article called "Tourism Among the Dogs" (Said 2000), Said describes the exile's genuine loss of identity as something Orwell never approached: "losing your identity as defined for you by where you come from and where most of the time you know (as Orwell certainly knew from membership in the lower-uppermiddle-class) you can return" (95). Orwell wrote, Said says, "from the perspective of someone who very definitely felt, and really was, at home somewhere" (95). Orwell's "political excursions," he says, were "tours in the garden, noLtravels abroad," not "harrowing exposures to real politics" (96). 4 In one of my own first published essays, I posed the question as follows: "How can a set of theoretical tenns that assume the pennanent, irremediable homelessness of our condition coexist side by side with the practical tenns of political discourse (common humanity and dehumanization, repression and liberation, experiential reality and its denial) that inevitably seem to present struggle as an effort to retrieve the (natural or given) homes from which people have been forcible removed?" (Robbins 1983). Francois Cusset, in French Theory: 1

FDucaull, Derrida, Deleuze and Cie el les mulalions de la vie inlel/ecluel/e aux £tats-Unis (2003), arguing that Said's "dialogue...avec la theorie fran~aise est

reste cruciale" (221), traces Said's identification of the cause of liberation with the figure of the intellectual in exile back to Deleuze and Guattari. The key passage is: "liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered, and

156

Bruce Robbins

exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figUre between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages" (Said 1993, 332). In Cusset's translation, however, the intellectual and the "political figure" are clearly the same person. In Said's original, that reading is not impossible but the more likely possibility is that "the political figure" is a separate person, distinct from the intellectual and the artist but resembling them in being a migrant. This would suggest that Cusset, like many others, is misreading Said as celebrating the solitary, lonely figure of the intellectual as political force at the expense of other sorts of political character and group.

Works Cited Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, 1992. Ali, Tariq. Conversations with Edward Said. London: Seagull, 2006. Anidjar, Gil. "Secularism." Critical Inquiry 33 (2006): 52-77. Bilgrami, Akeel. "Preface," Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. - . "accidentalism, the Very Idea: An Essay on the Enlightenment and Enchantmenl." Critical Inquiry 32:3 (2006): 381-412. Buruma, Ian and Avishai Margalil. Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies. New York: Penguin, 2004. Collini, Stefan. Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Cusset, Francois. French Theory: Foucalllt, Derrida, Delellze & Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux Etats-Unis. Paris: La Decouverte, 2003. Gunn, Giles. "On Edward W. Said." Raritan 23:4 (2004): 71-78. Hovsepian, Nubar. "Connections with Palestine," Edward Said: A Critical Reader. Ed. Michael Sprinker. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Hussein, Abdirahman. Edward Said: Criticism and Society. London: Verso, 2002. Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Mufti, Aamir. "Critical Secularism: A Reintroduction for Perilous Times." boundary 231 (2004): 1-9. Nixon, Rob. "London Calling: V.S. Naipaul and the License of Exile." South Atlantic Quarterly 87:1 (1988): 1-38. Robbins, Bruce. "Homelessness and Worldliness." Rev. of The World, the

Said and Secularism

157

Text, and the Critic and The Question of Palestine, by Edward Said. Diacritics 13:3 (1983): 69-77. _. "The East Is a Career: Edward Said and the Logics of Professionalism." Ed. Michael Sprinker, Edward Said: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. _. "Secularism, Elitism, Progress, and Other Transgressions: On Edward Said's Voyage In.'' Social Text 40 (1994): 48-73. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1978. _. The Question ofPalestine. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979. _. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983. _. ClIlture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993. _. Representations ofthe Intellectual. New York: Pantheon, 1994. _. "Palestine: Memory, Invention, and Space," The Landscape of Palestine: EqUivocal Poetry. Eds. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Roger Heacock, and Khaled Nashef. Birzeit University, 1999. -. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. -. From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map: Essays. New York: Pantheon, 2004. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

Humanism between Hubris and Heroism

CHAPTER SIX HUMANISM BETWEEN HUBRIS AND HEROISM

V ASSILIS LAMBROPOULOS

Near the end of his life, Edward Said tried to rescue a certain humanist practice from the general exhaustion of humanism in the 1970s following the post-structuralist onslaught. Against a homogenizing and totalizing tradition of imperial learning, he argued that "it is possible to be critical of humanism in the name of humanism" (Said, Humanism 10), and tried to outline the terms of such a possibility. He proposed the discipline of philology as a model for this counter-humanistic practice, suggesting that "the actuality of reading is, fundamentally, an act of perhaps modest human emancipation and enlightenment" (66) that enhances understanding. But how exactly can we be critical of humanism in a humanistic fashion? How can we practice a patient and systematic reading that questions, rather than reinforces, dominant dogmas and discourses? To examine these questions in a concrete way I will look at a twentiethcentury writer who throughout his life read very carefully and thoroughly some of the greatest Western works. Whether he adapted Sophocles or Shakespeare, German or Italian theatre, Bertolt Brecht tried always to be critical of humanist ideology in the name of the highest humanistic values. I propose to discuss the last major philological endeavor of his life, his work toward a new production of Coriolanus. After an exile of fifteen years, Brecht returned to Germany in 1948. A year later, the two Germanys were established and the playwright settled in East Berlin, where he completed the last play he ever wrote, The Days ofthe Commune (1948-49). In the years 1951-52, he was preoccupied with Coriolanus, wavering between adapting and rewriting it. Eventually he leaned toward the former. Working largely with the classic 19th-century translation by Dorothea Tieck, he cut scenes, shortened speeches, paraphrased, clarified, added. He published a preliminary translation of the first scene in 1952. The following year, he published the "Study of the First Scene of Shakespeare's Coriolanus," a dialogue on the same scene

159

among four theatre men-himself, two directors, and a dramaturge. He continued to revise, making many amendments to the original. When he died in 1956, the adaptation was still unfinished. 11 was published posthumously later that year, and it was rearranged and first performed in 1962 in Frankfurt. The Berliner Ensemble staged its own modified version of the adaptation in 1964. No other Shakespearean play represents class conflict more vividly than Coriolanus, J a play about the emergence of autonomous society, and the meaning of rule and virtue in it. 11 takes place around 490 BC, during the Roman republic that followed the fall of Tarquin the Proud, the last king of Rome, in about 507 BC. 11 shows the crisis of the warrior aristocracy that is driven by the heroic ideal of valor as virtue. But it also portrays the people as emotional and uncertain about their beliefs and goals. The play depicts an intense agonistic situation involving plebeians (small farmers, craftsmen, traders), five tribunes (elected representatives acting as intermediaries to protect the common people from the ruling aristocracy), patricians, and Volscians (a rival tribe to the south). 11 begins with a confrontation and the threat of civil war. In the opening scene, a mob of plebeians plans an uprising against Coriolanus whom they consider enemy of the people. Famine has struck Rome and citizens blame their leaders, demanding the right to set their own price for the city's grain supply. Here is how William Hazlitt saw Shakespeare's message: Anyone who studies it may save himself the trouble of reading Burke's Reflections or Paine's Rights of Man or the Debates in both Houses of Parliament since the French Revolution or our own. The arguments for and

against aristocracy or democracy, on the privileges of the few and the claims of the many, on liberty and slavery, power and the abuse of it, peace and war, are here very ably handled, with the spirit of a poet and the acuteness ofa philosopher. (IV, 214) Brecht turned the tragedy into a didactic play by injecting it with the political question that animated his last play, Days of the Commune: How can the people prevail in the extreme agonistic circumstances of an uprising? Hence, the four theatre people who study the opening of Coriolanus begin their conversation by examining the unity and determination of masses that reach the point of revolt. Brecht's adaptation arouses sympathy for the mob, favors the insurrection of the plebeians, and supports the interests of the common people. While the plebeians failed both in Shakespeare's play and in the 1918 Spartacist revolt of his youth, Brecht wants them to stand for democracy and win, turning Rome into a fraternal city of land distribution, refounding it upon social justice.

Vassilis Lambropoulos

Humanism between Hubris and Heroism

His adaptation ends with the balance of power shifting toward the tribunes who resist patrician pressure. Plebeians and tribunes gain in dignity while the patricians emerge as traitors. In 1964, the year the Berliner Ensemble produced its definitive version of Coriolanus, GUnter Grass delivered a speech entitled "The Prehistory and Posthistory of the Tragedy of Coriolanus from Livy and Plutarch to Shakespeare down to Brecht and Myself." In it, he attacked Brecht's text, "based on Plutarch's pedagogy and Livy's republican feeling for constitutional government" (xxvii), as a distorting adaptation and proposed a historical context for understanding it:

reasOns of heightening the conflict Grass in his play makes Brecht rehearse instead Coriolanus, a work on which he could indeed have been working that day and on that stage. For Brecht, the Spartacist uprising in Berlin in November 1918, his formative revolutionary experience, negated itself when workers obeyed a sign to keep off the grass. He is determined to create theatre that will help future workers avoid this mistake, teaching them how a true rebellion works. As the play opens, he is rehearsing a successful revolution by adapting the opening mob scene of Coriolanus. The rehearsal is interrupted abruptly when a delegation of workers appears, seeking, to enlist the Boss and his prestige in their unfolding uprising. He refuses to take them seriously. From the beginning Brecht (who is called throughout the play, "Boss") finds the workers who interrupt his work sloppy. He has no hope for their uprising because, on the basis of his experience, he knows that it lacks the necessary planning. When his wife, an actress who plays the mother of Coriolanus, challenges him, his disapproval is clear;

160

Bertolt Brecht adapted this tragedy, which has lost none of its sting, in 1952 and 1953. The period when he was working on it takes in the fateful date: June 17 th [1953]. While Brecht, leaning on Livy, was racking his brains to figure out how to provide the plebeians, whom Shakespeare arms only with staves and clubs, with more effective weapons, the construction workers of Stalin-Allee [Stalin Avenue] revolted, unrehearsed and unarmed, to protest against the increased production norms, as in other days the plebeians rose against the prohibitive price of grain. (xxxiv) June 17 was the climax of the 1953 uprising, with widespread strikes in East Berlin factories and shops as well as sympathy strikes and demonstrations in many East German cities and towns, demanding better working conditions, free elections, and a united Germany. Following his 1964 speech, and while he was participating in the 1965 election campaign, Grass wrote The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, a tragedy fraught with the dark ambiguity that he believed Brecht took out of Shakespeare. GUnter Grass's play The Plebeians premiered in January 1966 and was published later that year, causing a great stir in both literary circles and the popular press. The play takes place on a single day thirteen years earlier, on June 17, 1953, and portrays Bertolt Brecht and his troupe rehearsing his adaptation of Coriolanus. Observing the three unities of classical drama, this modern "German tragedy," as Grass called it, presents continuous action in the same setting and in the span of a few hours. The occasion in Brecht's theater is simple; the director and his collaborators are rehearsing the first scene of Shakespeare's play. Grass has written a play about staging a play where all we see on stage is the stage where the rehearsal is taking place. For four acts, all we see on stage is a stage. There is no outside world. While on June 17th Brecht was, according to historical record, rehearsing another adaptation (Erwin Strittmatter's Katzgraben) , for

161

VOLUMNIA: Suppose we're not in Rome today Or in King James's London, But in Berlin, and half the cityThe Eastern half, 1mean, our people Suppose all East Berlin should come disturbing, Hissing, demanding, And shut your theater down. BOSS: That smacks of Puritans; But since, as you yourselfjust said, This isn't Shakespeare's LondonPoor Shakespeare! Taking plague as a pretext, They often shut him down My theatre will stay open. At worst we'll have some broken windowpanes. VOLUMNIA: I've never been afraid. This time I am. Down there the people's rage is boiling over And here we are stirring up theatre dust BOSS: Oh unrehearsed incompetence! (18) In the end Brecht is of course vindicated when the upnsmg fails. Rehearsed theatre revolt has a goal and method while the unrehearsed street revolt has only passion and confusion. Throughout Grass's play, Brecht is obsessed with the tragic paradox of Coriolanus as it emerges already in the first scene; How can the audience endure the tragedy of the thwarted popular uprising? The plebeians revolt against those exploiting them but very soon they are swayed by deceptive

163

Vassilis Lambropoulos

Humanism between Hubris and Heroism

arguments and give up as General Coriolanus appears and pours his scom upon them. This tum of events should be unbearable to an East German audience. Brecht has decided that, if the mission of the stage is to educate its audience, it should present a successful way to launch a revolution. The paradox must be resolved, tragedy avoided. Thus he keeps rehearsing the opening scene to make sure that this time the plebeians will get the uprising right-that is, to eliminate the tragic dimension and ensure tlte triumph of the revolt. The audience of his production will not be exposed to the confusing vagaries of human frailty and historical contingency. Here is his goal:

Since 1918 he has seen people follow their impulse, improvise, and fail to seize power. The unrehearsed rebellion is not worth supporting. Convinced of the futility of the on-going rebellion, Brecht uses the workers for the staging of his uprising while they try to win him over to theirs. He quotes Shakespeare; they quote Marx. Only art makes sense to him. It provides the terms, the context, the values with which he deals with the world and people around him. He lives in a world of quotes-textual, verbal, visual, and auditory. Struggle is transitory; only art endures. "Paradoxically, he is seen at the start of the play trying to alter the course of literary destiny, 'upgrading the plebeians and the tribunes' and changing them into 'conscious revolutionaries.' When the workers ask him to upgrade their revolt and, as they see it, dignify their cause with his signature, thereby influencing their destiny, the Boss refuses" (Miles 161). The workers ask Brecht for a written manifesto but he believes he has been writing for them all his life, only they don't know how to read (Grass 27). Only one plebeian, the Hairdresser, asks for his direct participation in the revolt, quoting Mother Courage, a play of his that she has seen in the past and that has influenced her own participation. This appeal works because for once the quote and the action, the reference and the revolution, his youth and his present come together joining hands. Theater can lead people to the revolution. But before they reach the exit, the actress playing Volumnia returns with news from the street and stops them: martial law has been declared. She offers pragmatic advice for the company and its theatre. While in Brecht's adaptation the Roman plebeians are victorious, on the stage of his theatre the workers' revolt collapses. The desolation resonates with the question that Brecht raised in his Galileo of whether a country needs heroes:

162

BOSS: Grumblers. Amateur revolutionaries. My plays are full of them. When they hear machine guns, they run. ERWIN: But don't forget Spartacus was your first successful play. (Grinning) Revolutionaries and moonlight. BOSS: Even Liebknecht and Luxemburg were romantics. ERWIN: And what were you? An undernourished anarchist with a guitar and talent. BOSS (laughs soft'Y): It was a productive period though. The lines came bubbling. We argued all night. Should the revolution be classical or romantic? ERWIN: But in the end you came around to the aesthetic principle. BOSS: Marx himself stressed it. ERWIN: And Lenin says revolution should be practiced like an art. BOSS: Exactly. That's why we're putting on a didactic play. Instruct the public. Our indoctrinated tribunes will show the plebeians how you make a revolution and how you don't. (13) When the workers of Berlin rebel and come into Brecht's theatre to seek his support, we are introduced to another audience--not the one he imagines, but a real one. Furthermore, this new audience is not taking its seats in the auditorium but occupying the stage; and it will not wait for the complete production but is interrupting the rehearsal. Brecht, who by 1953 has seen enough of the twentieth century to fear the worst, cannot trust a spontaneous popular uprising. For a moment he is tom, but only for a very brief moment: BOSS: What a lousy date this is for the history books. Ah, Livy, Plutarch, Lenin. If! could only swim with the stream, leave Rome, move, be moved, make statements, true or false, shout; if I could only be beside myself, but in the swim. (Sits down exhausted) I'd like to be reading Horace. What do pines look like in the morning? (He sits hunched up behind the director's desk). (70-71)

ANDREA (loudly): Unhappy the land that has no heroes! GALILEO: No. Unhappy the land where heroes are needed. (98) Like the astronomer, Brecht cannot be a hero and does not think that a country needs one. In Grass's dramatization, the Hairdresser eulogizes the bleeding hero who has been wounded by police bullets when cutting down the communist flag on top of the Brandenburg Gate. At the end of Grass's play, Brecht realizes all is in vain. Nothing has been understood as he hoped. He writes an ambiguous letter to the authorities where two paragraphs declare solidarity with the regime and the last one sympathy for the workers. After this latest, bitter compromise, he understands that to him theatre has become an end in itself. Throughout the day, he has used everything and everybody for his next production. While at the beginning of the play Brecht plans to rewrite Coriolanus, at

Vassilis Lambropoulos

Humanism between Hubris and Heroism

the end he feels that he is himself a Coriolanus. They both exhibit the same arrogance and express the same contempt for the plebeians. "The similarity between the two rests in small part upon the fact that both felt their work was for the people, or their homeland at least, and felt it unnecessary, even demeaning, to prove their loyalty and carry favor with those who were not bright or perceptive enough to deserve the benefits of their activities" (Pickar 215). He never contributed to a real revoluti6b. Although he compromised in order to save his theatre, he cancels the production and leaves for the country, abandoning the empty theatre (much like his hero Galileo who at the end of that play denounces his exclusive commitment to pure science). He abandons the effort to adapt Shakespeare since events have proved that the stage cannot function as a moral institution. The defeat of the uprising has convinced him:

and Plutarch) and it converses with revolutionary theory and modernist theatre, Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author (where lhe stage represents itself and the initial rehearsal is also interrupted) and peler Weiss's Marat/Sade (which is also about putting on a play and an uprising, and has a writer as protagonist) in Grass's work. Brecht understands theatre as an independent microcosm where he is master/ruler: the world of aesthetic autonomy where rehearsal has priority over everything else. His theatre absorbs the revolution through techniques of rehearsing. By the beginning of Act 3, Brecht has integrated the uprising in his city into his production. Theatre converts the revolution into a performance and renders it impotent. Everything happens in order to be integrated into the play, or more accurately, in order to provide material to the rehearsal. Everything is justified only by its artistic (specifically, theatrical) potential. This Brecht ends up believing that the unrehearsed life is not worth living and that all the world is a stage? Machiavelli, in Book lA, "That Discord between the Plebs and the Senate of Rome made this Republic both Free and Powerful," of his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius (1512-17), explores how a republican government can be sustained. He praises the Roman tribunes [or opposing both Coriolanus and the senate and for allowing the expression of popular discontent. Thus he finds civic conflict beneficial to republics. In the conversation on Coriolanus which he published in 1953, Brecht stresses that the play's opening is full of conflicts: "And great and small conflicts all thrown on the scene at once: the unrest of the starving plebeians plus the war against their neighbors the Volscians; the plebeians' hatred for Marcius, the people's enemy-plus his patriotism; the creation of the post of People's Tribune-plus Marcius's appointment to a leading role in the war" (On Theatre 255). Yet he is more interested in contradictions than in agonism, as Brecht is looking for ways to reconcile conflicts and bring about a unified society. Theatre pulls him in an aesthetic direction, Marxism in a moral one. In both cases, the quest for the overcoming of contradictions is the driving force. Everything, beginning with the revolution itself, must cohere; everything must be artistically harmonious and morally consistent. This approach leaves no room for the contingencies of political agonism. But if Brecht remains trapped in the legacy of Left Idealism, what makes Grass's play larger than the drama of the committed artist is the Willingness of the plebeians to believe in such an artist. Brecht may wish to homogenize Coriolanus, that "monument of contradictions" (Grass 5). What is far more unsettling is that the parable of the belly, which in Shakespeare teaches the fickle plebeians submission, has the very same

164

BOSS: ... that we can't change Shakespeare unless we change ourselves. LITTHENNER [an assistant]: You mean we're going to drop Coriolanus? BOSS: He has dropped us. With contempt. From this day on we'll be at cross-purposes. Where there was solid ground a few hours ago, I see gaping, grinning cracks. Only yesterday I was rich in words of vilification. Today I haven't a single one to fit him, you, or myself. -And to think we wanted to demolish him, the colossus Coriolanus. We ourselves are colossal and deserve to be demolished. (Grass 103) Brecht will now withdraw from the city and from public art and will retreat to poetry, to pure and private art with no radical aspirations. His political idealization of art is gone, his theory bankrupt, his practice ruined. The bitter conclusion of the play brings to mind the poem "Nasty Morning" which Brecht wrote in his country house at Buckow in the summer of 1953, and was first published in 1957. The poem ends: Last night in a dream I saw fingers pointing at me As at a leper. They were worn with toil and They were broken. You don't know! I shrieked Conscience-stricken. (Poems 440) As Grass put it at the end of his speech, Brecht's hubris is that "everything turns to theatre in his hands; ... everything becomes for him an aesthetic question" (xxxvi). The Plebeians is a play about representation in that we never see the revolt happen. It is only reported, reconstructed, re-enacted. From a literary viewpoint, The Plebeians is a great postmodern palimpsest pulsating with multiple linguistic registers. Its intertextual virtuosity dazzles as it stages Brecht staging Shakespeare (while drawing on Livy

165

166

Vassilis Lambropoulos

Humanism between Hubris and Heroism

effect on the rebellious workers who hear it on Brecht's stage. The participants in Brecht's conversation discuss the dramaturgic question of how effective the great fable of heteronomy may be for a modem audience. Can the workers of Berlin believe the story that Menenius used in Shakespeare to defuse the insurrection? In the play by Grass, when the workers realize that Brecht is withholding his support for their struggle, they decide to hang him as well as Erwin, his dramatic adviser. It is at this point that, in order to save their lives, Erwin (Piskator) decides to use a trick of their trade and perform an excerpt from Coriolanus. He tells those who are about to kill the two of them the famous parable that the patrician Menenius tells the rising plebeians in the opening scene. When one day all the body's members decided to thrash the fat round belly because it was idle, the belly responded that the others cannot survive without the belly. The workers of Berlin understand that the belly is the state, admit that they depend on it, find the parable persuasive, and let the two theatre people go. Obviously, this proves Brecht right. Originally, he wanted to emend Shakespeare by eliminating the paradox so that the East Berlin audience would not be perplexed by the tragedy of the failed revolt. But Erwin has just used the Shakespeare original to reintroduce the paradox, confuse his listeners, and make them change their plans. If tragedy still works in communist Germany, Brecht concludes, the revolution has no future. Grass's tragedy shows both artists and workers trying to dissolve conflict and committing the insolence of a homogeneous, closed sphere, artistic or civic. Neither Brecht's revisionist plebeian uprising in the adaptation nor the uprising of the German workers in the streets moves beyond Act I, scene 1. Brecht departs with an utterly tragic indictment of all sides:

Both rehearsals are aborted, both experiments fail. Internal contradictions cancel both artistic and social revolution. Since Elizabethan times, Western drama has established a long tradition of plays that deal with the tragic dilemmas of rebellion. To stay within modem theatre, the list includes Romantic works like The Robbers by Schiller, Egmont by Goethe, The Borderers by Wordsworth, Marino Faliero by Byron, and Danton's Death by BUchner; modernist works like Dirty Hands by Sartre and The Just by Camus; and postmodern ones like The Balcony by Jean Genet, MaratlSade by Peter Weiss, Occupations by Trevor Griffiths, all the way to The Coast of Utopia by Tom Stoppard. When dealing with challenges of self-rule, political drama prefers the extreme situation of the revolution. By presenting politics in its most antagonistic manifestation, when rebellion may lead to destruction or foundation, theatre dramatizes the quest for civic autonomy-life in the tragic regime of explicit and self-reflective politics. Autonomy is possible when society posits itself as the source of its norms and institutes itself according to principles of self-governance. Democracy, the regime of autonomy, is the tragic regime because it renounces absolute guarantees and marked boundaries, pursues intrinsic justification and legitimization, and seeks limits to the self-instituting activity of the community in order to avoid hubris and self-destruction. In his tragedy, Grass shows how even critical work of tremendous ingenuity can lapse into traditional humanism, how philology, despite its best intentions, may start totalizing again. No matter how scrupulous, reading does not necessarily lead to enlightenment. Edward Said invokes heroic readings "that enable many others after them" (67). Brecht's approach reminds us that there are also many hubristic readings that disable or exclude many others. Said stresses that humanism "is not about withdrawal and exclusion. Quite the reverse: its purpose is to make more things available to critical scrutiny" (22) as products of the human capacity for self-creation. In addition to receptivity to discreet texts, Said advocates "humanistic resistance" which he calls "critique" (73). Once again, Brecht's political reading shows that interpretive resistance is not enough. His commitment to critique did not extend to participatory citizenship. When the struggle for freedom knocked on the door of his theatre, he saw it as an opportunity for more critique. Instead of helping fellow citizens, he offered them interpretive involvement in theatrical pleasures. Grass shows that progressive goals and rational approaches too can commit the hubris of closure, that techniques of "trouble" (77) can tum self-absorbed, that visions ofliberation can cloud readers' views.

BOSS: Do you want me to write: I congratulate the meritorious murderers of the people. Or I congratulate the ignorant survivors of a feeble uprising. And what congratulations will reach the dead? -And I, capable of nothing but small, embarrassed words, stood on the sidelines. Masons, railroad workers, welders and cable winders remained alone. Housewives didn't hang back. Even some of the Vopos threw off their belts. They'll be courtmartialed. In our camp they'll add new wings to the prisons. -And in the Western camp, too, lies will become official truths. The face of hypocrisy will rehearse a display of mourning. My farseeing eye sees national rags falling to half-mast. I can hear whole platoons of orators sucking the word 'freedom' empty. I can see the years hobbling by. And after the fatal calendar leaf has been plucked ten or eleven times, they'll take to celebrating the seventeenth with beer orgies as they celebrated the Battle of Sedan in my childhood. In the West I see a well-fed nation picnicking in the green. (108)

167

Vassilis Lambropoulos

Humanism between Hubris and Heroism

Critical humanism may take the path of hubris or heroism. It is interesting that neither of them is the result of conscious planning. No reading can seek to become hubristic or heroic-these are ascriptions given after the fact because we do not know where either of them begins. Said argues that critics need to maintain an alert sense of responsibility to provide "that kind of finally antinomian or oppositional analysis between the space of words and their various origins and deployments in physical and social place...all of it occurring in the world, on the ground of daily life and history and hopes, and the search for knowledge and justice, and then perhaps also for liberation" (83). According to the title of his book, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, in addition to being secular and philological, criticism must ultimately be "democratic"-it must be an exercise of democratic principles and practices. Humanism and participatory citizenship should be mutually reinforcing. A critical humanism that, like tragedy, guards against interpretive and political hubris may contribute in a modestly heroic way to the emancipatory struggle and the democratic project. The problem with critique, though, is that it is practiced as interpretive resistance because its domain is not the democracy of citizens but the republic of letters. As we know from genealogies of literature as an institution, this modem republic constitutes an autonomous cultural domain with its own discourses and mechanisms for the production of artistic value. Its residents are active consumers of literature who interpret it in diverse ways: authors interpret it by writing it, critics by reviewing it, readers by delighting in it, instructors by teaching it, scholars by researching it, directors like Brecht by staging it; but they all enjoy the aesthetic independence that only the social differentiation of arts such as literature can deliver. Those who join Brecht and Piskator on their stage are admitted into a very special community (the republic of letters) and experience an exhilarating sense of freedom (aesthetic autonomy) in freely exercising a special right (literary interpretation). What holds the community of interpreters together is the social contract of critique, namely, philology as an oppositional conduct-the belief, intrinsic to this republic, that interpretation works politically. If the contract of the community is the freedom to critique, the collective project of the community is to rehearse, which is exactly what is happening on Brecht's stage throughout Grass's play. Advocates ofJetters unanimously and unfailingly insist that their work is fundamentally political precisely because the constitution of their republic is by definition counter-political. Unhappy with existing politics, they maintain an alternative sphere whose denizens do not act on public issues but instead

textualize them. Dissatisfied with actual government and unable to replace it, they do not just envision a better society but enact it. Thus they rehearse in artistic terms revolution, freedom, justice, equality, and other ideals. They have no respect for current regimes or movements and do not expect them to address any major socio-political issues. That is why their orientation is utopian, prophetic, messianic, or apocalyptic, and their focus remains what is to come. It is important here to stress that the self-understanding of the republic of letters does not distinguish between praxis and theory, doing and contemplating, politics and art. Far from being anti-political, let alone nonpolitical, the sites of the republic provide the stage for a different politics, the uncompromising politics of difference. People of letters beg to differ and opt to defer. Public interaction in the republic is modeled not on the agora but on the theatre collective (like the collective rehearsing Corio/anus), the literary circle, the small magazine board, the artistic "school," the university seminar, and other "few select circles," to use Schiller's vision in the concluding paragraph of the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind. Therefore self-rule is practiced by the interpretive collective as a matter of artistic sociability, hence the aesthetic character of its autonomy. The practices of the political party, the revolutionary movement, the town hall meeting, or the workers' council are alien to it. During rehearsals, there are only possibilities, not positions. On Brecht's stage, everybody is a role, not an individual. People are not supposed to retain their street or work identity since that would thwart possibilities. The rebellion can be properly rehearsed only as an act of philological reading, only as open-ended experimentation with textual variants. If all the world is a stage, all politics should be performative. Performance requires distance (from one's person), which is why interpretation differs and rehearsal defers (the uprising). However, between the always already of texts and the not yet of rehearsals, the present has been annulled. In the end, the critique of presence debunks as illusory the appearance of citizens in the open, indicting politics as the metaphysics of the polis. It rejects the idea of a public space (meeting, mobilization, demonstration, strike, revolt) where citizens can be openly present. Caught between wake and wait, the present is doomed. The archetypal member of the republic is the stranger and the foreigner (with the trials of their displaced sociality)the German Adorno in Los Angeles, the Austrian Freud in London, the Algerian Derrida in Paris, the Palestinian Said in New York or, more generally, iconic figures like the pariah, the exile, the outcast. That is why

168

169

170

Vassilis Lambropoulos

Said is drawn to Auerbach in Istanbul (who serves as a trope) rather than Gramsci in prison (who served a sentence). That is why we think of Said as public intellectual but not citizen. Outside the republic of letters, the interpreter feels displaced, existentially homeless. If membership to a party, a union, an association, or a movement is established on the basis of identity, belonging to a counter-political republic is a question of alterity where the comrade is replaced by the other, and the votes of the citizen by the rights of the alien. The ensuing responsibility becomes how to extend hospitality to otherness, not how to forge solidarity with immanence. The rhetorical mode of aesthetic politics (and its artistic sociality) is irony. Like Brecht's letter to the East German authorities, interpretive resistance consciously equivocates. It certainly does not deceive itself about the brutality of the regime or its own duplicity in its preservation. It is also honest when it pledges to keep rehearsing great ideals till it gets them right. At the same time, it keeps a proud distance from any demands that present circumstances may make on its commitment, always drawing appropriately ambiguous conclusions from its dialectical considerations. Of course a letter composed from a critical distance and inviting diverse interpretations may be easily edited to support those in power. After all, they too act in the name of the people, proclaim humanistic principles, and can draw on philological methods. What is important is that the rehearsal of the future remains ironic, questioning metaphysics and resisting closure. That is why the presumed moral complexities in what Heidegger wrote about Nazism and Lukacs about Stalinism continue to be scrupulously interpreted. As Novalis knew, in an aesthetic worldview occasions are beginnings of novels, not of revolts. Throughout his life, Said remained interested in beginnings. His critique of origins continues to be important, but it is unfortunate that he did not elaborate on foundations, that is, on the beginnings of democratic polity. Political theory seems to be the missing link between his humanism and his politics: more than Said on Vico, it would have been indispensable to have Said on Machiavelli. But his political positions did not inform his interpretive practice. He had to keep his two kinds of writing apart in terms of format, style, and publication: he wrote politically about politics and counter-politically about literature. But then again nobody seems to know how to write politically about humanism since the critical function of humanism from the late eighteenth century has been to attack political positions as morally untenable. Politics by other means may be interpretive resistance and avant gardiste trouble but it is by definition counter-politics, failed politics, deferred politics. Democracy in another sphere may refer to professional

Humanism between Hubris and Heroism

171

societies, campus committees, and reading groups but it is by defmition a counter-political democracy. With these institutional limitations of philology in mind, in order to practice a democratic humanism it may be time to start our inquiry not at the self-satisfying end of critique (irony and interpretation) but at the other end, that of democracy-to start not with an oppositional performance but with a constitutional founding. What if, instead of rehearsing resistance and deferring democracy, we looked into the polity we want, the laws and institutions that may be more conducive to humanism than the present ones? What makes The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising one of the darkest modem tragedies is that, when Brecht refuses to leave the stage-his little autonomous republic-his severe reservations about the revolt unfolding in Berlin are perfectly valid, and by the end of the play they have been justified. Once again, a popular rebellion made serious mistakes that undermined it. Brecht may be choosing the rehearsal over the barricades but historically speaking he does know what is wrong with the uprising. Yet, it does not follow that philological endeavors focusing on Scene I of Coriolanus can help overcome the antinomies of revolt. If it is a great theatrical production we are pursuing, we can do worse than re-interpret Shakespeare. But if it is the overthrow of oppression that we seek, then we should revisit the legendary Spartacist revolt of January 1919 in Berlin which is constantly on Brecht's mind. In this regard, Said was wise enough not to textualize the tragic antinomies of the Palestinian struggle, and instead treated them as what they were, political issues. For example, when in 1988 the Palestinian National Council (the Palestinian Parliament in exile) declared Palestinian independence and undertook to set up a democratic government, Said, an independent member of the Council, helped draft the new constitution. In order to criticize German totalitarianism, an exiled master of philology wrote a book of close readings, blaming the Greek concept of mimesis for the Nazis. Critique can still learn from this exercise in interpretive resistance. However, those interested in the potential contribution of humanism to participatory citizenship will tum from one kind of beginnings to another-from Auerbach in Istanbul writing on literary origins to Said in Algiers contributing to political foundations.

This paper was first presented at Brown University, the European University, and the University ofMichigan. I am grateful to my hosts, Elsa Amanatidou, David Konstan, and Marinos Pourgouris in Providence, and Nathalie Karagiannis and Peter Wagner in Florence. I am also grateful to

Vassilis Lambropoulos

Humanism between Hubris and Heroism

the editors of this volume for their invitation to contribute and for their comments on earlier drafts. The paper is dedicated to Stathis Gourgouris, Edward Said's friend and mine.

_. Life of Galileo [1955]. Trans. John Willett. New York: Arcade

172

Notes I Shakespeare's last tragedy, his last Roman play, and most overtly political work was written probably in 1608, a year after the Midland Rising (the English peasant protests against nobles who confiscated communally held lands), and during a period of political struggle between Crown and Parliament. It used extensively a very popular translation of Plutarch's Lives that came out in 1579. Both the Roman Livy (59BC-ADl7) and the Greek Plutarch (50-125) describe the republican experiment in Rome in 490BC and tell the story of Coriolanus, the Greek author pairing the Roman general with Alcibiades. Grass, according to Lore Metzger,

infused the work with a tragic perspective. He gave his play the subtitle'A German Tragedy' (ein deutsches Trauerspiel), leaving it an open question whether he claimed to have written a tragedy or whether plebeians rehearsing an uprising is a tragic game Germans play. The tragic sense of inevitable suffering dawns on the protagonist only retrospectively, only after the event. Having recognized the full implications of his rehearsal of invulnerable aesthetic solutions while, concurrently, vulnerable men and women paid for their revolutionary attempt with terror, imprisonment, and death, the Boss retires from the theater world. The day's progress has called in doubt his convictions on art and moral responsibility....He abdicates his playcraft, like Prospero relinquishing his power of enchantment. He is not deposed but deposes himself. (141) Grass found himself in a similar position in 1966-68 during the student uprisings. It is not an accident that in the 1970 Royal Shakespeare Company production the actor playing Brecht had a Grass mustache.

Works Cited Brecht, Bertol!. Brecht on Theatre: The Development ofan Aesthetic. Ed. and trans. John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. - . Poems 1913-1956. Eds. John Willett and Ralph Manheim. New York: Methuen, 1976.

173

Publishing, 1976. Grass, GUnter. The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising [1966]. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966. Hazlilt, William. The Complete Works. London: J. M. Dent, 1930-34. Metzger, Lore. "GUnter Grass's Rehearsal Play." Critical Essays on Gunter Grass. Ed. Patrick O'Neill. Boston: G. K. Hall 1987. Miles, Keith. GUnter Grass. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1975. pickar, Gertrud Bauer. "Silberpappeln and Saatkartojfeln: The Interaction of Art and Reality in Grass' Die Plebejer proben den Aufttand."

Theatrum Mundi: Essays on German Drama and German Literature Dedicated to Harold Lenz on his Seventieth Birthday, September 11, 1978. Ed. Edward R. Haymes. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1980. Said, Edward W. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

Rethinking Humanism

CHAPTER SEVEN RETHINKING HUMANISM STATHIS GOURGOURIS

Admittedly, the scope of this essay is hardly delicate. I The decision to approach matters in broad strokes is deliberate and aspires to a certain politics which I feel it's necessary to divulge, not as a caveat but as a fair introduction to the thinking process that follows. I have come to the conclusion that in order for us to overcome the theoretical and practical quandaries in which we find ourselves in the humanities and the social sciences, in order to abort dead-end ideological structures, in order to extricate ourselves from the ceaseless proliferation of fragmented details of knowledge which becomes ever more disconnected both from its object and from the reality that gives it purpose-in other words, in order to respond to a political and epistemological malaise and confusion that, I believe, many agree about but cannot agree on what it means, where it comes from or how to get out of it-we need to relearn to speak in large tenns, to envision a vast horizon, to become unafraid of considering totalities, to spread before us the major components of a problem and reconceptualize its architecture, in short, to dare think beyond the seductive tyranny of detail. I understand, of course, the risks-the risks of generalization, perhaps even of homogenization-yet, this is precisely what I feel needs to be restored: a sense of risk which will bring to the forefront another sort of responsibility. Not the responsibility toward the exhaustive documentation of the particular, but the responsibility toward the inexhaustive conceptualization of whatever exceeds the particular, however we are to consider that. I am hardly discounting the importance of the fonner. As historians, anthropologists, philosophers, literary critics, and so on, we are all trained in this and must continue to train our students in it. But, nevertheless, I feel it is time to risk going against this training, if nothing else for the sake of a contemporary world that is getting larger and larger both in scope and in condition, as we speak, and, in getting larger, is

175

simultaneously more and more inscrutable. Substantially speaking, we are already late. It was already back in 1982, in a classic essay on the dialectical-critical parameters of humanist thinking, when Edward Said issued an exhortation that has gone unheeded: "Instead of noninterference and specialization, there must be interference, a crossing of borders and obstacles, a detennined attempt to generalize exactly at those points where generalizations seem impossible to make"(Rejlections 145).2 Given this framework, the proposal to rethink humanism is hardly driven by a desire to look back. Instead, it is driven necessarily by the command to reflect, thus entailing a redoubling motion, like a backwards flip, that would land us altogether elsewhere-this would be an elemental figure of the notion of revolution. Whatever we might want to say about it, even for committed anti-humanists, there is an institutional memory of humanism that cannot be outmaneuvered, but can only be rethought by being deconstructively reminded and remembered. This is the concise heritage of Friedrich Holderlin's notion of Andenken, of which Martin Heidegger made such venerated use. Such practice cannot obviously remain satisfied with the standard history of humanism that recognizes as the point of emergence the conditions of Italian Renaissance cities with sources in the writings of Marsilio Ficino, Niccolo Machiavelli, or Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. The great work of George Makdisi, for example, produces a formidable argument of humanist practices flourishing in the Arab madrassas, th libraries, law courts, guilds, hospitals, and mosques from the 8 century on, in Iraq, Egypt, or Andalusia. Especially in his book The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West (1990), Makdisi elaborates on modes and techniques of jurisprudence, rationalist inquiry, scholasticism, poetic thought, rhetorical eloquence, lexicography, disputation, speculative grammar, epistolary art, book production, and even what he explicitly calls the "Deconstruction of the Koranic Verses" and the "Deconstruction of the Prophetic Traditions"(xviii)-all of which become therefore essential in the intellectual (and, of course, political) upheaval that characterizes the Italian Renaissance, as Pico himself, after all, specifically acknowledged. I am not bringing this up as some sort of anti-Westernist correction, but in order to alert us to a problematic history all around, which means that the very concept itself-"humanism"-even as we seek to rethink it, is already multivalent and problematic, and we cannot thus presume, in a so-called anti-humanist gesture, that we can encounter it and efface it in some sort of holistic fashion. Makdisi speaks convincingly of what he identifies as secular humanist practices in medieval Arab Islamic societies. This alone derails the equation of

176

Stathis Gourgouris

humanism with secularism in the specifically understood Western sense, just as much as it derails any theory of secularism that seeks to identify it strictly with a Christian (or Christian-derived) social universe. By the same token, we can neither dismiss the catalytic importance of Italian Renaissance humanism in a long-term process of social and political emancipation that feeds the Enlightenment tradition nor, of course, disavow the complicity of this tradition in colonialist andimperialist catastrophe in the name of humanist values. No doubt, Arab humanism and Italian humanism diverge from Enlightenment humanism precisely in that their imaginaries are not worldwide-that is to say, world-encompassing and world-building. Yet, the radical elements emerging out of Renaissance cities become full-fledged in even more radical manifestations of social-historical upturning in the Enlightenment, even while being, at the same time, the very same elements that become frontal weapons in colonialist and imperialist domination. Both aspects are concurrent, co-incident, and intertwined, and neither should be considered singular or more significant, if the dialectic of Enlightenment (in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's definitive sense) is to remain a valuable lesson. Even the memorable and sumptuous invocation of the "death of man" that closes Michel Foucault's Les mots et /es choses-man as the figure in the sand about to be washed away by the waves of history-is best understood to belong to this dialectic. Otherwise, it becomes a mere image frozen in an uninterrogated anti-humanism, an academic posture that has destroyed Foucault's radical critical impetus. My argument, as will become evident, claims that this position as such, as uninterrogated anti-humanism, is no longer viable, and that we might want to consider seriously Edward Said's call-explicitly raised on account of this impasse-for a "non-humanist humanism." Said's Humanism and Democratic Criticism, the last book he completed and which, as I've argued elsewhere,) may be considered a refined example of his own late style, deserves here a brief explanatory digression in order to illustrate the logic and project of this mysterious phrase. Said's essays on humanism were famous lectures years before they found their way into print. In certain circles in the humanities, they were downright infamous, configured to bear the most concrete evidence of Said's alleged tum against theory. The argument circulated at the most simplistic level: insofar as the high days of French theory, in the spirit of '68, had made their mark through a devastating critique against the assumptions of the humanist tradition, any attempt to defend and reauthorize the discourse of humanism was tantamount to being anti-theory. This syllogism is not merely simplistic; it is entirely inaccurate in respect

Rethinking Humanism

177

to both sides. Neither was Said ever simply "anti-theory," nor were socalled poststructuralist theorists simply "anti-humanists." There is nothing a priori compatible or incompatible between the terms "theory" and "humanism." Their interrelation is, and has always been, historically contingent, before even the terms bore any recognizable coherence, before even being thus named, from Heidegger extending backwards to Friedrich Nietzsche and to Karl Marx. Said, of course, never hid his frustration with what he perceived to be the fetishism of theory, the specific sort of academic self-fashioning by means of a rarefied language that ultimately undercut any frame of reference other than itself. He found this indeed to betray the political purposes of theory-which, from his earliest avowed allegiances to Georg Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci, had meaning only in a dialectical relation to praxis-and he assailed such tendencies in both Europeanist and postcolonial literary studies, over whose theoretical parameters he had, at one time, presided. Hence the charge against him of an about-face. The lectures on humanism were met, practically everywhere in American universities, with a sense of betrayal by those who had been counted among his allies in the humanities during the '70s and '80s and with a sense of triumph by various adversaries, who had once inaugurated themselves as the defenders of Anglo-American humanist principles against the foreign onslaught. A careful reading of Humanism and Democratic Criticism, however, shows Said to confound both sides yet again. He initiates the argument with a relentless critique of latter-day American humanism (of the likes of Allan Bloom, William Bennett or Saul Bellow), who represent "the antiintellectualism of American life" and are characterized by "a certain dyspepsia of tone" and "the sour pursing of the lips that expresses.. .joylessness and disapproval," all of it driven by the "unpleasant American penchant. .. for moralizing reductiveness" and the stem conviction that "the approved culture is salubrious in an unadulterated, and finally uncomplicatedly redemptive way" (18-23). At the same time, Said does not mince words about "lazy multiculturalism" (50) and "specialized jargons for the humanities" (72). He rejects "ideological anti-humanism," which he identifies as a negative practice that nullifies a priori the sovereignty of the Enlightenment subject, instead of dismantling the assumptions this subject mobilizes in the ever-changing landscape of the post-Enlightenment world, precisely in order to wrest subjectivity away from its presumably impermeable ideological trappings. This double-sided rejection speaks of an equally double-sided purpose. Said initially proclaims his undertaking to be "critical of humanism in the

178

Stathis Gourgouris

Rethinking Humanism

name of humanism" (10) and yet later professes his aspiration to achieve the position of "the non-humanist humanist," which, by his own account, is a "dialectically fraught" position that takes humanism to initiate technique of trouble" (77). Any careful reader of Said over the years knows that his language can achieve the most extraordinary intertwining of the skeptical with the utopian, but is never equivocal or sophistic. These apparently contradictory assertions are not driven by some perverse desire' to confuse, but on the contrary, by stem commitment to elucidate the underhanded and deceitful ways in which identities-here, both the "humanist" and the "anti-humanist," but in essence all identities-are produced and cultivated. For a man who had once said, simply and succinctly, "imperialism is the export of identity," ("Genet's" 238) the critique of identity is not merely an occasional political stance (as in the critique of identity politics, for example) but a philosophical position that interrogates any practice of exclusion. Without ever adopting an ontological framework, Said consistently attacks any structure, discourse, or institution that renders itself unaccountable for forming identities, no matter what might be the historical necessity or political strategy. Hence, his tireless dismantling of authorities that demand strict obedience and adhesion to a priori principles: nationalism, imperialism, religion, the State, or those definitions of culture that bind societies in conceptual frameworks of "civilization"-this was, of course, the impetus of Orientalism. Many people would consider Orientalism an anti-humanist work, at least insofar as it explicitly follows Foucault in an exhaustive dismantling of the enterprise of philology and its profound complicity in the colonialist and imperialist projects, all conducted from the prerogative of the superiority of the cultural configurations of European languages and cultures. Insofar as this superiority is supported by the epistemological assumptions of an ideological humanism coming out of the Enlightenment era, Orientalism is indeed an anti-humanist work. Yet, this is a partial understanding, especially when viewed in the framework of Said's entire and now completed oeuvre, in which-this is my contention-there was never really a tum or a shift in the trajectory between early and late work. For one, the work is deliberately anti-systematic and cannot sustain a mode of organization that even retrospectively could discover early and late divisions. Moreover, it's sufficient to read carefully Said's early interviews from the 1970s, right around the time of Beginnings and then Orientalism, to see remarkable indications, even announcements, of the problems with which he will eventually wrestle in Humanism and Democratic Criticism and even Late Style. This is to say that whatever

"a

179

might be deemed "anti-humanist" in Orientalism is in place in Humanism and Democratic Criticism, which conversely also means that the exigency of thinking through humanism and by means of humanism is also present in Orientalism. Indeed, for Said humanism is ever-present as material and as project, continuously thought and rethought, configured and reconfigured, and, I might add, one of the crucial terrains of what he called "secular criticism"-which, incidentally, in the last work is changed to "democratic criticism," a rephrasing that deserves some serious attention. Said's essays on humanism follow a consistent line of thinking against identity, but focus on the core figure that drives identity production: the human as such. This focus is relentlessly sharpened by brushing aside abstract philosophizing about the "nature of the human" in order to foreground the range of human practices-the making of society, the making of history-as constitutive boundaries of the human. In this respect, Said's antinomian humanism is yet another elaboration on the task of secular criticism, which must be understood to work on both grounds of what is secular and what is critical. The text is full of descriptions of this task; I choose two: "[T]o understand humanism at all. .. is to understand it as democratic, open to all classes and backgrounds, and as a process of unending disclosure, discovery, self-criticism, and liberation.... [H]umanism is critique" (Humanism 21-22; my emphasis); and, "Humanism should be a force of disclosure, not of secrecy or religious illumination... [It] must excavate the silences, the world of memory, of itinerant, barely surviving groups, the places of exclusion and invisibility, the kind of testimony that doesn't make it onto the reports ..." (73, 81). Taken together, these phrases target both particularist and universalist practices by demanding a disclosure-Said is fond of using just as often the word "exfoliation"-Qf all exclusionary strategies, whether their authority is achieved in the name of the Self (and its global expanse) or in the name of the Other (and its narrowing essence). We may thus understand Said's call "to practice a para-doxal mode of thought" (83, his emphasis) as a call to subvert any orthodox tendencies, no matter what their purpose or justification. It's not so difficult to see why both dogmatic traditionalists, who defend the purity of the literary canon or of human rights, and dogmatic multiculturalists, who refuse to affirm anything other than their own minoritarian niche, would fmd much to be sour about in this book. But they are likely to miss that Said's presumed objection is not against their position in political, historical, or even theoretical terms, but against the orthodoxy of their position, against their entrenchment, their inability to consider that their position, after all, bears as well the mark of its worldliness, of being made in a specific moment in the world. This

Stathis Gourgouris

Rethinking Humanism

inability undennines and occludes the historical accountability of such positions because it denies them the realization that they remain open to being, just as easily, unmade (and made anew, made otherwise) when worldly conditions demand it. Said's work is, in this respect, the gravest adversary to critiques of humanism that see it as mere ideology, a position famously developed in Louis Althusser's 1962 essay "Marxism and Humanism"-an essay of great importance because it succinctly prefigures the most influential theory of ideology to come out of 1960s theoretical thinking~ Yet, what Althusser refuses to entertain is precisely what Said places at the forefront: that humanism is a social-historical fonnation, of multivalent and heterogeneous legacy and with utterly debatable contours, trajectories, and points of origin, which, as any other social-historical fonnation, has borne certain ideological uses (themselves hardly predictable or uncomplicated). By the same token, the '60s movement against humanism is hardly any less ideological in this very sense. But even this equivalence does not mean we can still settle on humanism as an ideology-and certainly not in contradistinction from what Althusser, so unproblematically, characterized as Marxist science. The ideological content of social fonnations is surely open to inquiry, interrogation, and debate--and I'd be the first to engage in such polemics-but the point of this project, of rethinking humanism, cannot be reduced to such debates over content. The stakes are much higher. If it is to have any radical meaning today, humanism must be encountered in its full range as an epistemological framework, and specifically as the framework that fields the question "what is human?" as a constitutively open question. The framing itself points beyond the mere ontological dimension ("what is the human?") to a broader philosophical interrogation of how an epistemology of the human produces, organizes, hierarchizes, but by the same token represses, disfigures or extinguishes, certain modes and objects of knowledge (including, we must add, humanity itself). Such interrogation pertains both to Jacques Derrida's unfinished meditation on the problem of "animality" and to redrafting the tenns of deconstructed humanism (on the other side of Derrida, as it were), of practicing a "non-humanist humanism," in the Saidian sense I have already mentioned. And even more, I would add, this epistemological inquiry into the human cannot be conducted without a critical meditation on whatever domains are deemed to be beyond the human, though paradoxically residing within the purview of the human. Such domains could be identified by a variety of names: transcendental, metaphysical, supernatural, spectral, virtual, etc., but also ontological and orthological, or however we may wish to name the realm that concerns the

questions of Being as such or Reason as such-that is, as entirely selfidentical (tautological) categories. In this respect, I can only dwell on the obvious: that, from a certain standpoint (which I very much espouse), the domains of "beyond-thehuman" are domains of human creation. This particular penchant of human beings to produce realms and domains which they then deem unreachable in human tenns, domains that are situated in some indetenninable or even absolute outside relative to human existence, seems to me to be a unique characteristic of the human, perhaps even consubstantial with the human, and thus a fascinating point to anchor our inquiry. The fact that humans consistently produce that space "beyond-thehuman" and on it rest the foundation, origin, or source of their selfdefinition-that is to say, the originary signifying framework, the meaning of the question "what is human?"-is to me the real arche of any such investigation. It is the most paradoxical arche, an arche that is also a telos: a gesture of identity fonnation, which is at the same time a gesture of (albeit shielded and denied) identicide. Or, in terms that I prefer to use: a gesture that produces heteronomous identity by means of shielding the autonomy of the very act that extinguishes the meaning of autonomy. But I have already gotten ahead of myself. There is a triad of tenns here-humanism, humanity, the human-that, although I will try to keep distinct, are nonetheless hopelessly intertwined. They are all bound together-and indeed bounded all around-by their relation to history: a relation that hinges on their production of history and, simultaneously, on their determination by this very history they produce. In many ways, it is this history that underlies my entire inquiry, even when-perhaps especially when-the discussion veers inevitably into certain ontological categories.

180

I.

181

Three Phrases of History

As a way of getting a more tangible sense of this history, I proceed on the basis of working through three statements-two of them recognizable and much discussed, and a third (perhaps the most radical of all) curiously unaffected by such discussions and relatively overlooked. I.

To be radical is to go to the root of the matter. For humanity, however, the root is humanity itself. -Karl Marx (1843)

The apparent circularity of this statement is much richer than it might seem. In fact, it is not quite circularity, except in the obvious redoubling

182

Stathis Gourgouris

form of a self-reflexive figure. On the contrary, it opens the way to a peculiar mode of obtaining and sustaining knowledge, a mode consubstantial with the domain of the human, in the sense that whatever framework is signified by "humanity" constructs the epistemological terms of its own knowability. This framework is mapped simultaneously by the radical stakes raised by the question "what is human?" as well as the stakes raised by the question of "what does the human do (in order to b'e human)?" I see these two questions as co-incident, and it is this order of co-incidence, rather than circularity, that characterizes the epistemological quandary of Marx's statement. The primary and most evident thing about the statement is that no radical understanding of humanity can come from elsewhere, from another domain or vantage point-meaning, not from God, not from Science, not from History, not from Philosophy, for these are already domains constructed and structured by humanity, even if humanity, in its exorbitant foolishness, has granted them, in the guise of various modes and practices, transcendental authority and monopoly of truth. Less polemically, one might say that these are mere attributes of humanity, and in this respect secondary to what might make humanity a radical source of knowledge. Radical here, in Marx's view, means first and foremost whatever has neither basis nor cause, whatever has nothing underneath on which it might stand, but also nothing beyond it which might serve as objective limit point or external guarantee. Hence, the knowledge of humanity is always radical because nothing else authorizes it, because it is simultaneously, co-incidentally, both the subject and the object of (its) knowledge. The notion of co-incidence gets us out of the debilitating circularity in the sense that in order to make oneself one's object of knowledge one must already put into practice a radical interrogation of what makes one the subject of this knowledge, the subject of this cognitive object. (I return to this later when I raise the paradox of auto-didacticism.) Conversely, no subject can claim a position of radical self-interrogation unless one recognizes one's being as a perpetual object of question, thereby forbidding the position of an a priori transcendental subject, in effect unchangeable, self-sufficient, and selfenclosed. In this framework, neither of the two positions (neither subject nor object) can possibly precede each other, but nor do they form a tautology between them, because their very being is differential, open to (self-)interrogation and (self-)alteration. The co-incidence I am suggesting is shadowed by another dimension. Traditional humanism has been haunted by the allegation that it has constructed the meaning of humanity on the basis of universal content, of

Rethinking Humanism

183

a definitive wager on the existence of such a thing as human nature (even when there might be argument about its content). Conversely, the antihumanism of, say, the last 40 years claims to have established the absence of human nature as such-a claim that, in its essentialist negation in the name of an essential particularity, is indeed just as universal. In both cases, the answer to the question "what is human?" is a given, since both conditions, in their polarity, assume that the question can be answered as such, without including the condition that what is human must be perpetually open to question, that it itself (the human) is signifiable by virtue of continuously raising new questions and new determinations of what might be considered to be human. But what does this mean exactly? I am venturing an argument in which the question "what is human?" is as such the primary signification of being human-not the content, the answer to the question, but the question itself. This is not because being human is unknowable, in the same way, for example, that in certain religions God is quintessentially unknowable or in theoretical mathematics a set of numbers can exist but is unknowable. Rather, because what is knowable about the human: 1) seems to have been always (historically speaking) subject to question, with all kinds of postulated, contended, and overturned theories about how to answer this question; 2) insofar as it is thus the ground of its own knowability, what is knowable about the human remains, all the while--even as such theories are postulated, contended, and overturned-a point of interrogation, a question as such. In other words, my argument goes, being human is a question because one bizarre but consistent force that makes human beings radically human is precisely their penchant for interrogating anything and everything in their environment, even if the answers they often produce and assume may be entirely unfathomable, unreal, useless, or catastrophic. Here, the nature of how this interrogation takes place, as well as what sorts of answers are given in various social-historical instances, is of crucial importance and deserves to be studied in detail, though such specifics cannot override the radical interrogative stratum I am suggesting. In the end, the matter of barring cognitive authority that resides in anything prior or beyond is the most radical element in Marx's understanding and crucial to the trajectory of our inquiry. II.

Every humanism is either grounded in a metaphysics or is itself made to be the ground of one. -Martin Heidegger (1949)

There is something self-evident about the thinking going on in this statement. I can't quite imagine how one could argue against it. And yet

184

Stathis Gourgouris

we must not argue against what it says, for it is self-evident, but argue against what it implies, what it commands: in other words, against what sort of work this way of thinking is made out to do in Heidegger's interest. To be a closer reader for a minute: knowing even a bit of Heidegger we can presume that the first part of the phrase ("every humanism is grounded in metaphysics") cannot possibly apply to him, for it is the critique-in fact, the destruction---of metaphysics that his work announces and'is presumed to conduct from the outset. The second part is the most troublesome and murky: "every humanism has made itself to be the ground of metaphysics." One might say, "but it's obvious: insofar as humanism is an ideology-acts ideologically or supports and mobilizes ideologies-it becomes (or is made to be) the ground of a metaphysics." This is true but unsatisfactory. It assumes that either all humanism is always ideological (like Althusser does), or that humanism is there to serve certain ideologies in historically specific terms. About the latter there can be no argument in terms of historical fact, but this not the issue here, because Heidegger, we all know, aims beyond historical fact. It is precisely this beyond that makes the second phrase unreadable: Heidegger's beyond may be what enables him to decipher that humanist thinking, in its incalculable variants, becomes the ground of a beyond, but, by the same gesture, it is also what conceals that he, too, apprehends and comprehends "what is human" by means of what is deemed to be "beyond the human"-that is to say, by something meta-human, metaphysical. Why is humanism inevitably metaphysical for Heidegger? Because "it presupposes an interpretation of beings without asking about the truth of being" (246), or as he repeats later, because "it does not think the difference between being and beings" (247). I have already suggested in what sense I think the category "beyond-the-human" belongs to the cognitive parameters of the human. I am not contending that there is no such thing as beyond-the-human in itself, objectively speaking. I am suggesting that we can never know whether beyond-the-human is or isn't, exists or doesn't exist as such, for whatever manifestations it has had that we can apprehend, whatever marks it has registered and however we are to recognize such registers, have all been a matter of the condition of hZ/manbeing, a condition that presently I will withhold from defining, but I assure you it has nothing to do with Dasein. For Heidegger, very simply, "being 'is' precisely not 'a being'" (255), and the matter is not one of singularity-a being among beings-because it is precisely this conventional difference between individuality and collectivity that Dasein overcomes. "Being is the transcendens pure and simple" (256), as he reminds us explicitly. Whatever it is, Being (Dasein) is altogether outside

Rethinking Humanism

185

the order of living beings, humans or otherwise. In fact, as far Heidegger is concerned, it is precisely that humanism relegates humans to the order of living beings that makes it metaphysical: "Metaphysics thinks of the human being on the basis of animalitas and does not think in the direction of his hZ/manitas" (246-7), and later on, in reminding us of his argument from Being and Time, "Humanism is opposed [in Being and Time] because it does not set the hZ/manitas of the human being high enough" (251). Setting hZ/manitas high enough is, at the very least, extricating it from animalitas. This is not merely a matter of the conventional difference between humans and other animals-which I shall examine shortly-but, rather, a matter of difference between living and being. In this respect then, humanism is metaphysical or becomes the ground for metaphysics because it fosters an image of the human being as a living being. This seems to me to be a nonsensical notion. Barring the possibility that in positing this notion Heidegger might be considering the human being as an inanimate object, the only domain left that would distinguish human being from living being is some sort of transcendental domain, a metaphysics. For this is the only possible way in which the so-called ontological difference can be accounted. To posit a difference between Being and beings is, despite Heidegger's agonizing efforts to ground it in pre-Socratic thinking, a blatant misapprehension of the cosmological imaginary of the pre-Socratics. Heidegger reads the primary philosophical question of Being in the contemplation of the verb to be (as an infinitive}-in Greek ti to einai-while, from the Anaximander fragment onward, the question concerns rather the contemplation of being as selfdetermining substance-in Greek ti to on---out of which emerges an understanding of einai, as an operative verb that indexes a condition and hardly a disembodied source. S Positing a difference between Being and beings is only possible if you assume external determination of matter and essence, if you assume a source of creation to which all creatures are bound, if you assume eternal pre-substantial presence, etc.-all of which are quintessentially theological notions. It is in this respect that all ontology in its Platonic derivatives-and Heidegger's is one of the most overwrought such derivatives-is always onto-theology, or if you will, an ontology of the divine, the immaterial, the otherworldly. To redress this problem, we must consider that in the composite name "human-being"-even if we want to continue to imagine it as an ontological condition-the interrogative attention must be placed on "human," not on "being," because it is the human that gives this being whatever meaning it might have. This meaning, I would argue, is never given once and for all but is interminably negotiable and alterable by

186

Stathis Gourgouris

Rethinking Humanism

virtue of the mutability of the human. The ontological question in regard to the human can never be reduced to an account of Being and its pennutations, unless being is an intenninably mutable category that rests on nothing and signifies nothing in itself. (It is precisely this non-meaning of being which rests on abyssal infinity that underlies Anaximander's cosmology.) In other words, it is the (condition of) "being human" that enables the (meaning of) "human being" and not the other way around~ whereby "being human," again, is signified and judged, not by any sort of philosophical categories, but by the magma of social-historical significations and practices that pertain to it. Obviously, I'm not arguing that humanity is a mere cultural category, whose relativism would eventually lead us to entertain the ridiculous notion of multiple humanities. But neither am 1 to settle for an understanding of humanity that owes itself to any sort of traditional ontotheology, which would ascribe to humanity immutable and essential characteristics in all cases detenninable outside its domain. Rather, the self-detennining mutability of humanity is precisely what accounts for its singularity as a category. This mutability is recognizable-indeed, even simply possible-as a social-historical condition, which means that, if we have to speak of humanity at all in tenns of ontology, we would speak of historical ontology, a notion that, from a strictly philosophical standpoint, is an unacceptable paradox.

Heidegger. Benjamin's aphorism raises the stakes of the entire framework and leads us in fact into very complicated territory, a cognitive labyrinth that, I confess, I am not entirely certain 1 can navigate. In one way, he seems to suggest a rupture between biology and history-or more precisely, a rupture within biology instituted by history. This is consistent in Benjamin's thinking throughout. Consider his peculiar and fecund way of conceiving "natural history." What he calls the "relation between nature and the human" is precisely what this entire category-natural history-eonceptualizes. Benjamin is cunning in making sure that we cannot walk away from this aphorism with the interpretation that history has vanquished biology-or that history has vanquished (human) nature, if you will. We can assume he means that history has produced a different nature, a different specieS-being, if notand that is a lot to say-a different species altogether. Yet, the biological or natural-historical language remains unaltered: it is humanity as a species that history (as technology, modernity, etc.) brings into emergence. At the same time-and this is what makes this conceptualization maddening-the signification of species is irreversibly altered, and a definitely new arche is put into place, into the place of a te/os already achieved. How then can we settle on the biological language being unaltered if the signification of species is defmitely altered-moreover, altered by history? There is no doubt here that, for Benjamin, history is always an affair internal to the human and this, again, is consistent throughout, no matter whether he occupies himself with the inanimate, the bestial, the angelic, or the messianic. History is internal to the human because-and Marx is all over Benjamin on this issue-no one else but human beings make history (even if not quite as they please). In light of this discussion, let me reiterate that making metaphysics is one of the most common and most powerful ways in which humanity makes history. Indeed, only human beings can have a metaphysics: that is, create an entire world in effect alien to the "world" in which they live, purposely unreal and, even more paradoxically, purported to account for the ultimate unaccountability of the real. Even more important: the penchant of humanity to create metaphysics is one of the commonest ways of striving to overcome its animality. In this respect-and this is not at all a paradox-metaphysics is one of the key fonns of human-being, of human animality.

m.

It is true that humans as a species completed their evolution

thousands of years ago; but humanity as a species is just beginning its own. -Walter Benjamin (1928) This breaks through both the threat of totalization in Heidegger's statement and the threat of circularity in Marx's statement. It is a historical gesture in the fashion of Walter Benjamin, inimitable historian. Benjamin posits a historical rupture within the species category, whether this is conceived biologically or ontologically, and the latter would include, as far as I am concerned (and staying within the specific reference frame set up here), the trajectory between Marx's "species-being" and Heidegger's Dasein. For Benjamin, "humanity" as a category becomes a veritable species in modernity, that is, at the moment when technology ceases to be merely instrumental and becomes productive, understood in the sense that, as he says specifically, "technology is the mastery not of nature but of the relation between nature and the human" (487). Heidegger, too, seizes upon this resignification of technology but cannot unhook himself from the commandment of his investment in onto-theological Being. But enough of

187

188

189

Stathis Gourgouris

Rethinking Humanism

II. A Digression on the Digression of the Animal

equation whose solution is ab-solved of any reality. In effect, alterity only appears to be absolute. It is imagined as absolute because its proximity, its familiar reality, is intolerable. One might go so afar as to say that precisely because alterity is not absolute, precisely because it is not conveniently determined by its own rules but is rather internal, partial-partial to us, part(ial) of us-and therefore very much our own, part of our oikas, that it must be made absolute, so that we can be rid of it, in order then to submit to its regal extemality, its determining force. In any case, despite the profound philosophical merits of contemplating the significance of the animal and whatever the brilliance and inventiveness of the techniques of such contemplations, the process can never be anything other than the contemplation of the question I posed at the outset, the defmitive question, whose affirmative content can never overcome its essence as a question and whose multivariant answers cannot but rebound to the interrogative domain: the question "what is human?". How animals have been raised, captured, bought and sold, employed, exhibited, domesticated, trained, sacrificed, and consumed is-and will always be-a matter of human history, the only history there is. I consider history here neither mere representation of living and dying in the world, which would be apt to every living being, nor the representation of creating and destroying the world, which is the exclusive property of the human being. History has meaning precisely insofar as the representation of living and dying, creating and destroying, is open to question. This entails, at the very least, that besides being a domain of action, of creation, history is always and at the same time an object of reflection. Its meaning then is subject to judgment, and in this specific sense-even when there is no judgment, even when there is ignorance or deliberate denial of its significance-history is the determining force of how we signify living and dying in the world, creating and destroying the world. I say this because the discussion of the animal as it pertains to the human cannot be conducted with the naIve expectation that it will reach some sort of transcendental knowledge of what an animal is-Qther than the simple, but oh so complex, matter of a living being-nor with the spurious intention, philosophically speaking, that, by contradistinction, the discussion of the animal elucidates the truth of what the human animal is. The first will lead us to accounts of animality inevitably drawn from the position animals have had in history (again, in effect, accounts of their encounters with humans, within the world of the humans). The second will be implicated in the classificatory paradox of the name "human animal," which cannot obtain an unequivocal truth by definition: because the human animal is indeed an animal like any animal (within, of course, the specific

I understand the importance of recent philosophical inquiries into the notion of the animal, at whose forefront I would place Derrida's unfinished project L 'animal que done je suis (2006) and Giorgio Agamben's slim volume The Open: Man and Animal (2002). There is a great deal of other recent theoretical work on this issue, broadly speaking;' from Donna Haraway to Katherine Hayles, Cary Wolfe and the bioethicist Peter Singer, but, however we are to judge this discussion, it is an encounter with the basics of Western thinking and thus a continuation of a long line of work, from Plato and Aristotle to Aquinas and Descartes to Kant and Wittgenstein. And while the conventional view is that, on this issue, traditional philosophy contemplates the animal within the framework of an avowed anthropocentrism, I would not easily concede that the recent work-identified in certain circles as post-humanism-is any less anthropocentric, whatever might be its pretensions, its claims, or indeed its bona fide philosophical differences. To his credit, Derrida acknowledges that thinking about the animal is constitutively impossible for philosophy and belongs instead to poetic thinking. To my mind, this is not because poetic thinking is any less anthropocentric than philosophy. Rather, I would say that, in comparison to philosophical thinking, poetic thinking is less repressed about its animality. Burdened, alas, by Platonism's hatred of the sensuous (in Greek, aesthetikon), philosophy obliterated, in the very phrase zoon logon ekhon (Plato's def'mition of the human), the determinant force of zoon. As a result, the trajectory of Western philosophy henceforth would attribute all sense of the living substance (zoon) to the possession of logos-which, by the way, has nothing to do with Reason or language as indication of rational thought, as classic humanism has always had it, but rather with language per se, as a specific animal virtue. Yet, despite philosophy's inadequacy before the animal-Qr perhaps, because of this inadequacy-Derrida cannot move onward to an assessment of the human animal as such, because-and this is his quintessential limit point in practically every meditation he takes up-the animal, for him, comes to settle on the most unsettling position possible: the absolute Other. Without mincing words, this reluctance to deconstruct absolute alterity renders an otherwise sumptuous meditation on the animal impertinent to the exigency of characterizing the human animal in specific terms, which I consider essential to the project of rethinking humanism. Because I am admittedly simplifying an enormous matter, an incidental word: Absolute aIterity is unfathomable. Its absoluteness is a perverse

191

Stathis Gourgouris

Rethinking Humanism

zoological classification that pertains to it), yet, insofar as it is the human animal, it is like no other animal on the planet. This disjunction may be similar to Agamben's thesis that what characterizes the human is not the conjunction of animality with some sort of other, excessive, superimposed, and perhaps even supernatural, order: spirituality, reason, divinity, etc.

something that, in self-induced fashion, is always more than itself and other than itself. In this sense, conditions of surplus and alterity would be self-emergent of/in human-being, never external to this being, even if they are continuously externalized. In another sense, these conditions of self-emergent surplus and alterity could be conceived in terms of Heidegger's "world-building" (weltbildend) capacity of the human, a capacity that automatically characterizes "being-in-the-world" as a figure that presupposes and ensures the inseparability between being and the world. I acknowledge, of course, the lurking danger of collapsing the notions of human and world, dangerous because it leaves the politics of world-making uninterrogated. So, in using and addressing this relation, we must account for the fact that world-building is always simultaneously world-destroying and can never be tantamount to the historical mission of a people, as Heidegger famously announced. Indeed, to be frank, we have to be able to imagine the possibility of total extinction-total extinction of humanity, of the nature of the world, of planetary being itself. This is not a fantasy; it's a reality. It's already a reality in the sense that it is technologically feasible: the annihilation of humanity is perfectly possible here and now and so is, in physical, material terms (though we know not the full extent of it), the annihilation of the planet Earth. This annihilation is inherent in worldbuilding-Qtherwise the notion is dangerously instrumentalized and privileged.

190

If the caesura between the human and the animal passes first of all within man, then it is the very question of man-and of "humanism"-that must be posed in a new way. In our CUlture, man has always been thought of as the articulation and conjunction of a body and a soul, of a living thing and a logos, of a natural (or animal) element and a supernatural or social or divine element. We must learn instead to think of man as what results from the incongruity of these two elements, and investigate not the metaphysical mystery of conjunction, but rather the practical and political mystery of separation. (16) Although I agree with Agamben positing a disjunction, I disagree with positing a separation, because the two elements of disjunction (as Agamben later admits, too) remain always in co-incidence. The human animal is an animal; its animality is an undeconstructible condition of being. However, what makes this animal human, as opposed to canine or reptilian, is precisely the proposed denial of its animality, or the striving to overcome its animality (which is, in effect, a denial). One form this impossible denial, this striving, takes is to conduct inquiries as to the animal, whether they are manifested in terms of the classificatory investigation of biology or the philosophical categorization of ontology. Agamben is correct to want to dismantle what he calls the "anthropological machine" (29) but wrong when he attributes to this machine ontological primacy. Even if the "anthropological machine" at its most abstract is humanity'S putting into practice the anthropomorphic designs of its monotheistic imaginary-to make (the world) according to its own image and resemblance-this is a social-historical condition. And even if we disagree about the specifics-which society or societies? which history or histories?-Qr even if, moreover, we might agree that the anthropological machine is there from the outset, from the first societies on the planet, this still does not exempt it from being a social-historical condition. In other words, there is nothing ontological about the "anthropological machine" unless the ontological domain of the human is history itself. This would make for a peculiar ontology: a framework of self-cognition where on (the Greek word for living being) is, by definition, self-authorizing and interminably mutable (self-altering)-hence,

III. Three Concluding Propositions about Human Animality as Points of Departure In his late paper "Analysis Terminable and Interminable" (1937), Sigmund Freud, not altogether in jest, identifies three impossible professions: psychoanalysis, pedagogy, and politics. Let us ignore the mailer of profession, so as not to get stuck on issues of technique, and simply call them practices. They are impossible practices because they are interminable. All three claim as their end (aim) to undo the entrenched and unquestioned conditions that are accepted as ends (terminations), in the sense that they seek perpetual transformation, and indeed to be precise, transformation conducted from within, as an internal process, a process of self-alteration. It is in this specific respect, as self-analysis, that psychoanalysis is interminable, not because your analyst refuses to let you gO.6

I find these three domains useful in honoring the demand to address specifically in what terms the question "what is human?" is, as such, the

192

Stathis Gourgouris

Rethinking Humanism

platfonn of the signification of the human. As a question that is itself the signifier of the answers it demands, it is in this respect likewise intenninable and impossible. The question itself is exemplary of the poetic praxis that characterizes the human animal: the creative transfonnative substance that entwines psychic and social-historical realities and produces them as ontological dimensions of the human. Terribly briefly and schematically, I will just state the three specific' domains: 1. Since Aristotle's De Anima, an option has been available to detennine~ the animal not by physiology but by the living substance that animates it: the psyche. And though the translation of the Greek to the Latin anima is problematic to say the least (particularly as it becomes interpolated by Christian thought and turns into the "soul"), what detennines the human animal as specifically human resides in this animating psychic substance. This substance is certainly not reason. An elementary account of how human beings operate in relation to their environment demonstrates them to be quintessentially unreasonable. Nor is it language, if by that we don't refer to complex semiotic structures, but to the foundational function of language: communication. All animals communicate with their environment and the overwhelming majority of animals act reasonably. But human beings don't act reasonably and often fail to communicate, and this has nothing to do with the discontents of civilization or any sort of organic mishap, but their psychic make up. Aristotle introduced us to the notion that all animals possess a psyche, but only in the human animal is the psyche essentially phantasmatic capacity-phantasmatic capacity for knowledge, for thought: "The psyche never thinks without a phantasm" (oudepote noei aneu phantasmatos e psyche in De Anima).? The importance of denoting nous here is as crucial as the importance of phantasma. Whatever it might consist of physiologically, the mind is essentially powered by fantasy; it thinks by way and by virtue of fantasy. Not fantasy in the strict Freudian sense, although Freud's understanding of the thought-power of the dream-work is crucial, as is his commitment to deciphering the underlying link between dream-thoughts and human sexuality, despite obviously his patriarchical inadequacy in his interpretation of sexuality. To cut to the chase, what characterizes human animality exclusively is traceable in its sexuality-in the fact that human sexuality is essentially animated by fantasy, that pleasure is defunctionalized and surely not detennined by the compulsion for reproduction. Indeed, even when the primary pleasure of sexuality is invested in reproduction, as for example in conditions of socialized compulsion under the rules of certain religions,

cults or sects, it is the imaginary investment in those particular social institutions that enables the pleasure, not some functional animal need for the preservation of the species. Conversely, even in those cases, as in certain primates, when masturbatory activity is observed among animals, the only zoological inference that can be made is that this "deviation"-for that is precisely how such activity makes sense in a world of functional reproduction-is animated, as it were, by organ pleasure and not by defunctionalized fantasy. Otherwise, chimpanzees, not humans, would have invented pornography. In broader tenns, the human psyche mobilizes what essentially preserves it (and thus preserves the human) in its capacity for a defunctionalized imagination, unbridled and unlimited-apart from the limits that the psyche itself learns to imagine and to institute. The psyche's quest for meaning as survival response to an environment in which the human animal is biologically inept is the primary animating substance of human-being and constitutes the necessity of this learning. All language, reason, culture etc. are the manifestations of this quest to signify and institute-in psychoanalytic tenns, processes of sublimation which enable and enact this learning. Sublimation, as I have argued elsewhere, has a politics; it is not an organic or ontogenetic process, but a social-historical process. 8 Hence, the purported excessive desublimation of our era is not some sort of psychic loosening. But neither is it some extraordinarily devious plan for power by what Gilles Deleuze has identified as the societies of control. Indeed, it is not in effect desublimation. It is sublimation toward structures, practices, and institutions that dehumanize human-being by an investment in objects that in fact suppress the transfonnative power of the imagination and turn it into mere conformity while-this just becomes a matter of course-depriving the psyche of pleasure. The most precise and thus unsettling description of this process is, to my mind, Michel Houellebecq's controversial novel The Elementary Particles (1998), where this debilitating, desexualizing sublimation goes hand in hand with the project of cloning sexless beings. Though these beings are created by humans-this is the important lineage, not the genetic cloning-they are not human. The capacity of humanity to create its own destruction is, as well, remarkably and exclusively-alas!-the mark of human-being. 2. Such a sublimatory quest to signify and institute cannot possibly repeat itself automatically and identically. Whatever it signifies and institutes becomes itself a force that rebounds and acts upon the process of signification and institution. But even then not sequentially. The signifying and instituting imagination may be unbridled and defunctionalized, but

193

194

Stathis Gourgouris

Rethinking Humanism

does not exist in a vacuum, in the void of its windowless solipsism. The instituted is simultaneously an instituting force-this simultaneity is undeconstructible-but neither does this mean continuous circularity, mere reproduction of the institution. Precisely because the psychical dimension is defunctionalized there can never be purely fictionalized reproduction, the re-institution of the same, cloning aspirations notwithstanding. Both the instituting and the instituted are open to self- ' alteration, and this itself is the ground of the social-historical domain that counters and complements the psychical. As example of its social-historical function, it has been a classic thesis of traditional humanism to name paideia one of its nuclear principles. The referent was essentially paideia as a Platonic idea, the Socratic model of submission to the master-interrogator of the truth, the philosopher. In essence, this doesn't change either in John Locke's view of education working upon tabula rasa or in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's marvelous tutorial fictions in Emile. By the same token, it also animates the colonialist mission civilisatrice, which, as Franz Kafka inimitably showed in his Report to an Academy, is closely kin to animal training, to a sort of zoological socialization. As radical educators, however-and I presume that we recognize it and share it, even if we may disagree on the terms-we would reject this model of paideia, if nothing else because it shields the most essential pedagogical element: that knowledge is not extracted and imparted from some complete and pre-existing pool, but is continuously-interminably_ made and unmade, created and interrogated. It is therefore never possessed singularly and exclusively, by anyone person, anyone culture, or anyone history because every such person, culture, history is as much an object as it is a subject of knowledge. It makes perfect sense that, in his understanding of paideia, Plato ignores the philosophical lesson of tragedy. In the famous ode to anthropos in Antigone, Sophocles defines the extraordinary force of human beings-ouden deinoteron pelei-as the capacity to teach themselves (edidaxato) the very things that surround them and act upon them. Cornelius Castoriadis has drawn attention to this essential paradox, which is nonetheless hardly illogical ("Aeschylean" 16). To teach yourself means, on the one hand, that you know something that your self doesn't quite know (otherwise how is learning going to take place?), yet on the other hand, something that you do know (otherwise who does the teaching?). This cannot be sufficiently reduced to theories of split subjectivity. In fact, the split is a matter of an internal co-incidence of being both subject and object of knowledge.

This paradoxical mode of self-teaching, which I consider the basis of all pedagogical relations and present simultaneously in both positions (teacher and student), points to a threefold epistemology that makes pedagogy, emergent as it is out of the psychic substance, the primary social-historical anima of the human: I) knowledge alters and transforms-it does not confirm behavior or conform to necessary instinctual patterns; 2) in recognizing oneself as an object of knowledge, the knowing subject recognizes that it is not absolutely sovereign, but rather itself subjected to interrogation, to the quest for (further or new) knowledge; 3) the process of knowledge, and therefore of teaching and learning, is interminable so long as humans are alive, for both its source and its aim is the perpetual capacity of the human animal to alter itself and its relation to its environment. I only mention here that this pedagogical epistemology I am suggesting extricates us from the long and burdensome weight of paideia as humanitas, which characterizes humanism all the way through the trajectory of Christianity to Heideggerian ontology. I also note that in one of his earliest meditations, his first investigation of the humanism of Giambattista Vico, Edward Said underlines precisely this epistemology of auto-didacticism. 9 3. Aristotle goes further than Plato and identifies the human animal as zoon politikon. In this respect, he names the human-animal substance as the surplus of the singular animal. Human-being can come to be considered a condition-and become humanity-because its being is animated by a social bond. Although a great number of species are demonstrably social animals, for Aristotle, the humanization of the human animal is achieved by virtue of belonging to the polis, predicated on sharing a collective interrogation and self-authorization of the law, a social bond that undoes even the natural bonds of kinship. Incidentally, consider that, as ancient Greek texts tell us time and again, to become apolis, to be exiled from the city, is tantamount to death-in fact, worse than death because one lives a life not worth living, a life of utter inhumanity. The polis is not a place. It is utterly absurd that Heidegger considers it as the placeless abstraction of Da wherein Dasein dwells; Thucydides speaks of the Athenians, not of Athens. The polis is this conflictual, interrogative sharing, whose "place" exists in the social-imaginary itself, even if narratives of autochthony, of being native to a specific geographical coordinates, seem inevitable processes of occluding this imaginary. For a thinker like Aristotle, who is formed by the traditions of Athenian democracy--even if his own experience coincides with democracy's suicide, the imaginary of the polis from which he draws his

195

196

Stathis Gourgouris

anthropology is specifically instituted against kinship structures. It is precisely why, unlike Plato (who was after all terrified of democracy), Aristotle is the first philosopher who will investigate the unraveling of kinship that Athenian tragedians so inimitably staged as a first order interrogation on behalf of the political demands of a city at war. While Aristotle's assessment of tragedy in the Poetics is tainted by his own experience of tragedy's political irrelevance, his much discussed' meditation on the tragic overdeterrnination of kinship by philia (friendship}-which yielded, as Derrida famously spearheaded, a politics~ of its own-is, for me, the third crucial component or animating substance of being human. It is the peculiar capacity for phi/ia, for friendship, that makes the human being a political animal: zoon politikon. I will not at present engage with the recent literature on this issue, which may be more vast even than the discussion on the animal. Permit me only to mention that such discussion would have to pass through one of the classic Renaissance texts, which could have been a centerpiece of humanism, if its political content were not so radical and, in the language of recent years, some would say, "anti-humanist." I am referring to the extraordinary "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude" (1549) by Etienne de la Boetie, in which friendship is invoked as the one force that constitutively mobilizes resistance to tyranny, the very thing that human beings voluntarily sacrifice in their perverse desire to relinquish their autonomy, to submit to external authority. It is thus only fitting that Michel de Montaigne's famous celebration of friendship in the Essays is indeed motivated by and dedicated to La Boetie. These three impossible and interminable domains of practice-which I have merely laid out as starting points for a project of rethinking humanism-are meant as directions toward a resignification of the human animal against the conventional parameters of humanism. There could be others, of course-like the matter of vestment, as Derrida theorizes, or the privilege of laughter, as Henri Bergson famously argued. In any case, the risk one assumes in rethinking humanism demands that one posits (in the sense of affirms) such specific domains-----{jomains that are predicated on the question "what is human?" remaining open, even while they denote the horizon whereby the animality of the human is exercised or performed in processes of humanization, processes that institute and sustain conditions of autonomy and self-alteration.

Rethinking Humanism

197

Notes I This was initially presented as the Andrea Rosenthal Memorial Lecture at Brown University, at the invitation of the Department of Comparative Literature. 2 I thank Ali Behdad for reminding me of this passage. J "The Late Style of Edward Said" in Edward Said and Critical Decolonization, Ferial J. Ghazoul, ed., 37-45. 4 In Louis Althusser's For Marx, pp.2 19-248. 5 See Cornelius Castoriadis, Ce qui fait la Grece, 185-201. 6 See Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers Vol. 5, 316-357. The consummate discussion of this issue, with inordinate brilliance and fabulous humor, is Cornelius Castoriadis' "Psychoanalysis and Politics" in World in Fragments, 125-136. 7 See, De Anima, Book III, 431a 17-18. 8 See Gourgouris, "Philosophy and Sublimation" Thesis Eleven 49, 31-44. 9 Edward Said, "Vico: Autodidact and Humanist," 336-352.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Althusser, Louis. For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: NLB, 1977. Benjamin, Walter. "One-Way Street." Selected Works Vol.l. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1996. Castoriadies, Cornelius. "Aeschylean Anthropogony and Sophoclean SelfCreation of Anthropos." Figures of the Thinkable. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. -. Ce quifai la Grixe. Paris: Seuil, 2004. _. "Psychoanalysis and Politics." World in Fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Derrida, Jacques. "The Animal That Therefore I am (More to Follow)." Trans. David Wills. Critical Inquiry 28 (Winter 2002): 369-418. Freud, Sigmund. Collected Papers Vol.5. London: Hogarth Press, 1950. Gourgouris, Stathis. "The Late Style of Edward Said" in Edward Said and Critical Decolonization. Ferial J. Ghasoul ed. Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2007. 37-45. _. "Philosophy and Sublimation". Thesis Eleven 49 (May 1997): 31-44. Heidegger, Martin. "Letter on Humanism." Pathmarks. London: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Makdisi, George. The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990.

198

Stathis Gourgouris

Marx, Karl. "A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" 1843. Early Writings. New York: Vintage, 1975. Said, Edward. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. -. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000. - . "On Jean Genet's Late Style." Imperialism and Theatre: Essays in' World Theatre, Drama and Performance. Ed. J. Ellen Gainor. London ~ and New York: Routledge, 1995. - . "Vico: Autodidact and Humanist." The Centennial Review 11:3 (Summer 1967): 336-352.

CHAPTER EIGHT THE UTOPIAN HUMANIST EFTERPI MITSI

[It is] a truth beyond all question that the world of civil society has certainly been made by man and that its principles are therefore to be rediscovered within the modifications of our own human mind. -Giovanni Batista Vico

The examination of the history of the terms "humanity" (first appearing in 1430), "humanitian" (1577-now obsolete), and "humanist" (1589) is useful for the discussion of the contemporary role and significance of humanism, especially in terms of the humanist's public identity and political responsibility. Since its fust appearance in English in the early nineteenth century, the word "humanism" has become a complex term, challenging in light of its many traces, difficult to rethink and reevaluate, not to mention, to redefine. The term owes its origin to the Latin humanitas, used by Cicero and other classical authors to signify the kind of values one would get from the studia humani/atis, the education concerned with human culture, specifically, language, literature, history and moral philosophy. In 1589, Abraham Fleming uses the word "humanist" in his translation of Virgil's Georgics, to signify "one versed in the humanities" (OED). A few years later, the grand tourist Fynes Moryson, in the section "Precepts for Travellers" of his four-volume account, An Itinerary Containing His Ten Yeeres Travell (1617), identifies the ideal reader/traveler with the "Humanist, him that affects the knowledge of State affaires, Histories, Cosmography, and the like" (11). After leaving England in 1591, Moryson spent ten years traveling throughout Europe and in Turkey, recording the descriptions of peoples, their customs, religions, forms of government and language; suggesting that the humanist is someone interested in humankind, Moryson developed a new sense of the ~or~, "humanity." The Oxford English Dictionary

"

200

Efterpi Mitsi

The Utopian Humanist

presents Moryson' s definition as the first sense of the word, "a student of human affairs or of human nature," following the legacy of that diligent student of human diversity, who persevered in his long voyage prompted by his curiosity "to see forraine Countries" and explore not only what divides but also what unites humanity. Considering that the word "human" (from the Latin humanus) was not differentiated from "humane" until the early eighteenth century, it is' evident that humanity since its early definitions (e. g. in Thomas Cooper's Latin-English Dictionary of 1565) encompasses the qualities of being_ human and those of being civilized, such as courtesy, gentility, civility, together with liberal knowledge (Pincombe 6). Does the model of Renaissance humanism, which moved from the world of the academy to the world of diplomacy and commerce, becoming a polyglot, eclectic and pragmatic culture, have any resonance today? Can this model that emerged from a mixture of generically heterodox materials from both classical and vernacular literatures help us think again about the question of the human in the contemporary world and within the current search for new aesthetic and political forms of representation? The representation of the humanist, his social role, political responsibility, and his ensuing dilemmas in a crucial text of the English Renaissance, Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516), read in light of Edward Said's secular humanism, shows that issues raised by Renaissance humanists are not obsolete today. On the contrary, Utopia presents a method of critique that not only exposes human folly but also subverts the affirmations and certainties voiced by the interlocutors in the text. In combining fiction and philosophy, literature and politics, humor and polemics, More's text inaugurates a humanist aesthetics founded on the questioning and questing mind. Rethinking the question of the human in the context of the postmodem misgivings about the very use of the term requires an excavation deep into its ruins and origins, starting from its etymology (humanus akin to homo). What is the connection between humanism and humanity? Humanity has been defmed as the quality that makes the creature "man" or "woman" different from all other animals, a "human being" who makes his/her own history. As Arthur Kinney has put it, Renaissance humanism signals "man's total freedom for self-fashioning" (6). Since the Renaissance, humanists have believed that human beings, capable of making choices and changing their minds, are responsible for their actions. The eighteenthcentury philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico (1668-1744), drawing on the model of Renaissance humanism, contrasted certainty (cerIum), what humans learn from empirical observation, and truth (vemm), a kind of structural model in the mind used to interpret the "certainties" of sensory

experience. For Vico, history is thus constantly transformed by the developing modifications of the mind (Leach). In his major work, the New Science (Scienza Nuova), published in 1725 and, completely rewritten in 1730, Vico posits truth as a human act and as the driving force of history. In this view, through agency comes understanding. Vico expands the values and ideals of the European Renaissance, which placed a new emphasis on the expansion of human capacities. Reviving the study of Greek and Roman history, philosophy, and arts, the Renaissance humanists developed an image of "Man" more positive and hopeful than that of medieval Christianity: rather than being a miserable sinner awaiting redemption from corruption and salvation from the mouth of hell, "Man" became, according to Christopher Baldrick, "a source of infinite possibilities, ideally developing towards a balance of physical, spiritual, moral, and intellectual faculties." Although it was only in the eighteenth-century that humanism disassociated itself from Christianity, defming "Man" as a being with a mind rather than a soul, Renaissance humanists were the fust to point out the hypocrisy of Christians, whose dogma based on "love" ("Love thy neighbor as thyself') has never prevented them from showing hate and barbarism against their neighbors, all in the name of true religion. Indeed, it was a sixteenth-century humanist, Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), who argued in his famous essays "On the Cannibals" that the horrible violence inflicted upon heretics by Christians in contemporary Europe was far worse than the cannibalism reported of South American "savages." Similarly, in Utopia, considered by Paul Kristeller "a masterpiece of Renaissance humanism" ("Thomas More" 7) and a major contribution to moral and political philosophy, More, a devout Catholic himself, presents a society governed by rationalism and religious tolerance, quite the opposite of sixteenth-century Europe. Initiating the modem utopia, More not only invented the word and the genre but also described an ideal society achieved solely by human means, without the intervention of divine providence. Relying neither on God (millenarian visions) nor on nature's supernatural bounty, like the Golden Age of antiquity, the first prerequisite of More's utopia is humanity. Alain Touraine argues that utopia may be defined as a specific content that opposes it to other forms of dreaming, anticipation or denunciation that arise when people lose hope in a paradise in some world beyond, and therefore seek it on earth ... Utopia is a plea for a society that creates itself, imposing freedom or servitude on its members, pushing away any nonsocial principle of the legitimacy of the social order. The utopian world always rests on equality, never on liberty or even justice. (18)

201

202

Etlerpi Mitsi

The Utopian Humanist

Utopia formulates the idea that the human being is entirely social, that a person has neither supernatural nor individual reality (18). More's text is different not only "from anything that had appeared before in the classical or Christian world" but also "from anything... in the non-Western world" (Kumar 33).' Utopia's bond with the socio-political context arises at the very moment More decides to situate his ideal society on an island somewhere in the New World, inspired by the actual "discovery" of new' places, especially the encounter with America. 2 The virtue of tolerance, which More praises in Utopia but does not experience in his career as a courtier and a statesman during which he, in fact, falls victim to intolerance, is a unique feature of humanism. An intellectual attitude rather than a creed, tolerance denounces all forms of religious zeal, "including zeal for humanism itself' (Leach). More's Utopian society "warns against an imprudent Christian zeal," emphasizing the importance of religious freedom and toleration in preserving peace (Baker 51). Providing readers and writers with a skeptical base from which to criticize any prejudiced certainty, the discourse of Renaissance humanism and especially its method of interrogation still resonate in a world fraught with intolerance and violence. In the same way that More's text is read today, not as a guidebook to the ideal society, but as a critical questioning of human institutions and as an exposition of human folly with the hope it can be corrected, a rethinking of humanism cannot lead to any new kind of utopia but can address disturbing questions and dilemmas faced by contemporary citizens and intellectuals. Said invokes Vico in his definition of humanism in Humanism and Democratic Criticism as "the practice of participatory citizenship" whose "purpose is to make more things available to critical scrutiny" and thus disclose its "human misreading and misinterpretations of a collective past and present" (22). Like Vico, Said wants to see religion and myths as human productions, "therefore accessible to rational understanding, because they are man-made in the first place" (Mitchell 462). Said's distaste for religion and myth is opposed to a secular or "rational civil theology," the phrase that Vico uses to describe his own humanism. Although Said's intellectual development can be traced to his affiliations with a wide range of intellectuals, and critics, Andrew Rubin maintains that no interpretative strategies have been of more importance to his attempt to transcend the structure of domination and coercion than the work of Erich Auerbach and Giambattista Vico. 3 In the chapter entitled, "Introduction to Erich Auerbach's Mimesis," Said stresses Vico's influence on Auerbach, calling the former's view of human beings as historical creatures in that they make history "a revolutionary discovery of

astonishing power and brilliance" (Humanism 90). Vico's methodological point, that the human mind "makes and then can reexamine its own history from the point of view of the maker" (Humanism 91) is adopted by Auerbach in his interpretation of humanistic texts; in Mimesis, he attempts to read each text as if he were its author, "living the author's reality, undergoing the kind of life experiences intrinsic to the author's life... by that combination of erudition and sympathy that is the hallmark of philological hermeneutics" (Humanism 92). Vico and Auerbach are key figures in understanding Said's humanism. Rubin credits Said with "the development and reinvention of what could loosely be called a contesting and politically minatory secular humanism," a critical humanism which "legitimizes the work of colonized and indigenous subjects and at the same time forcefully promotes the contributions of postcolonial critics" (43). Vico's cyclical notion of history creates a tragic narrative which underlies, for W,J.T. Mitchell, Said's secular humanism. Although history reveals a progress of civilization through actualizing the potential of human nature, Vico also emphasizes the cyclical feature of historical development. Society progresses towards perfection without ever reaching it; interrupted by a break or return (recurso) to a relatively more primitive condition, history has to begin its course anew, starting each time from the higher point already attained. In Vico's eternal historical life, humans emerge only briefly (during the age of man) from the ages of gods and heroes before declining again into savagery with the rise of skepticism and the resurgence of superstition, the barbarie della reflessione-barbarism ofreflection. 4 Said's antagonism to posthumanism, as Mitchell points out, could be interpreted in this context as part of his resistance to decadence and decline, "his insistence on the intellectual's responsibility to lost causes and unfashionable ideas (humanism, criticism), and his wariness about hollow ideals (democracy) used in the service of domination" (462). His claim and redefinition of humanism as praxis leading to democratic criticism seeks to "save" the positive legacy of humanism from late twentieth-century postmodernist and feminist writers who use it as a pejorative term in their critique of philosophies that rely upon the possibility of the autonomous, selfconscious, rational, and single self. s Said's project opposes attempts to dismiss humanism by emptying it from all its significations and associations. Refusing to define the term in a book devoted to explaining humanism, Tony Davies characteristically concludes that "(t]he meaning of humanism is the semantic tangle, or grapple, that makes its meaning so difficult to grasp" (128). The result of such postmodern evasions is to easily make humanism guilty of whatever one wants, either (according to

203

205

Efterpi Mitsi

The Utopian Humanist

Davies) supporting an array of tyrants from the Borgias to Bonaparte or promoting cultural superiority and oppression of others. 6 The often uncritical dismissal of humanism and of all its literary and aesthetic traditions and possibilities leads Said to its passionate defense: "When will we stop allowing ourselves to think of humanism as a form of smugness and not as an unsettling adventure in difference, in alternative traditions, in texts that need a new deciphering within a much wider context than has' hitherto been given them?" (Humanism 55). Said's use of the term suggests that a critique of humanism does not, necessarily end with its demonization. Although Said exposed in Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism humanism's complicity with empire, his entire work shows the possibility of "other humanisms that survive the compromise with imperialism" (Apter 35). The convergence of humanism and politics in Said's work summons Thomas More, whose writings, together with those of his contemporary Niccol6 Machiavelli, first disclose according to James Hankins "the characteristic dilemmas and tensions of modern political thought" (118). More's Utopia epitomizes Jill Kraye's view that Renaissance humanism was "a broad intellectual and cultural movement" rather than a "narrowly philological enterprise" (xv).7 Neither adhering to a distinctive political position nor espousing a coherent political theory, Renaissance humanists nonetheless shared an ethical and political discourse, "understood as the [common] assumptions underlying the various views and theories," a discourse that "presupposed that a stable and just secular government could be established, at least in principle" (Yoran 522-23). In Utopia, the dilemmas and the responsibility of the humanist create the framework of the narrative itself. The first book of Utopia presents the traveler Raphael Hythloday [Hythlodaeus] (to whom More is introduced in Antwerp), and explores a subject quite popular at the time: the best way to counsel a prince. Before introducing the reader to Raphael, Utopia opens with two letters: one exchanged between Thomas More, the narrator and persona in the text [Morus] and Peter Gilles, town clerk of Antwerp; and the other, between Gilles and Jerome Busleiden, counselor to Charles V. The letters add verisimilitude to the fiction, stating that the two men actually met a man named Raphael and explaining why nobody else has traveled to Utopia: while Raphael mentioned the exact longitude and latitude of the place, someone coughed and Raphael's words were inaudible. Moreover, the prefatory letters blend fact and fiction, thus distancing readers from the fiction of the Utopia and alerting them to the complex literary games of the text in its connection of Utopia to the contemporary world.

The first discussions with Raphael provide the opportunity to expose the ills affecting Europe in the early sixteenth century, such as the propensity of kings to engage in wars and the wasting of a nation's money on futile endeavors. Discussing the decision-making policies of kings, "More"s tries to persuade Raphael that he could be very useful in a court, advising kings and princes. Raphael disagrees, arguing that no monarch would listen to his counsel and no privy counselors and cabinet ministers would consider his proposals, his views being too radical. In this passage, More reflects on the duty of humanists and philosophers to engage in contemporary politics, to deal with real situations and, for the sake of the common good, work within flawed systems in order to improve them. The debate demonstrates that both "More" and Hythloday represent More's own indecision about the value of court service. Known as the "Dialogue on Counsel," the argument between the two interlocutors reveals the fundamental crisis of Renaissance humanism, pondering whether the new humanist learning could be used effectively to reform society. The first to propose to Raphael to become a courtier is Peter Gilles, being impressed with Raphael's knowledge of "both the Old and the New World legislation"9:

204

My dear Raphael, I can't think why you don't enter the service of some king or other. I am sure any king would jump at the chance of employing you. With your knowledge and experience, you'd be just the man to supply not only entertainment, but also instructive precedents and useful advice. At the same time you could be looking after your own interests and being a great help to all your friends and relations. (19) Raphael objects to the idea, saying that he has already shared his property with his friends and relatives, and therefore, "[t]hey can hardly expect me to go a step further, and become a king's slave for their benefit" (19). When Peter corrects him by pointing out that he said "service, not servitude," Raphael answers, "a few letters don't make all that difference" (19). The pun resting on a simple prefix (servias versus inservias) denotes the fundamental difference between Raphael and his interlocutors. Whereas for Peter and especially for "More," it is the learned man's duty to "help other people, both individually and collectively" (20), for Raphael the intellectual has to be free "to live exactly as [he] please[s]" (20). He believes that court officials are enslaved, competing for the favor of the king and striving for money or power in the dangerous world of the court. "More" intervenes to propose that the application of Raphael's talents to public affairs is not opposite to his admirable disinterestedness in money

206

Efterpi Mitsi

and power. The only way to benefit the world is by "gaining the confidence" of a king and by giving him "really good advice" (20), argues "More," comparing the prince to a fountain from which springs of both good and evil flow over a whole nation. Humanists and philosophers would be unable to influence the world through their learning, correcting its follies and its evils, unless they had access to this fountain of power. Hythloday is not taken in by "More's" flattery and immediately condemns' the king's councilors and their vices, citing England as an example. In his speech, known as "the Cardinal Morton episode," Raphael denounces the, policy of enclosing the land of peasant farmers for sheep grazing. He describes the sufferings of the peasant families that were forced off the land by the law of enclosures, as well as how their poverty and desperation led them to a life of beggary and theft. As Romuald Lakoswski points out, Raphael's denunciation of this policy "is profoundly ironic in that the purpose of the diplomatic mission that led More to Bruges and Antwerp in the first place was to renegotiate the Wool Staple with Prince Charles of Burgundy (later the Hapsburg Emperor Charles V)" (37). Refuting Raphael's lengthy argument that people in power listen to flatterers rather than philosophers, "More" then cites Plato's Republic: "a happy state of society will never be achieved, until philosophers are kings, or kings take to studying philosophy. Well, just think how infinitely remote that happy state must remain, if philosophers won't even condescend to give kings a word of advice!" he admonishes Raphael (35). "More" is pointing to the weakness in Hythloday's whole approach-that the message must be adapted to each audience and situation, im~lying a conflict between Ciceronian rhetoric and Platonic philosophy. I When Raphael insists that "there's no room at Court for philosophy" (41), "More" makes a distinction between the "academic variety, which says what it thinks irrespective of circumstances" and "a more civilized form of philosophy which knows the dramatic context, so to speak, tries to fit in with it, and plays an appropriate part in the current performance" (41-42), adopting a Ciceronian humanist position rather than a Platonic critique of society. He asserts that even if philosophers cannot uproot wrong views and opinions, they should nevertheless not forsake the commonwealth and ignore political reality. The theater metaphor used by "More" indicates that only by playing a role in the court can the humanist affect public life, an argument that upsets Raphael who interprets such performance as hypocrisy and deception: "I don't know whether it's right for a philosopher to tell lies, but it's certainly not my way," he proclaims (42). The debate suggests that for More and his generation of English humanists, Plato's famous dictum "had become a paradox" and that the

The Utopian Humanist

207

"civilized" or urbane philosophy of "the Italian humanists (and perhaps also of Erasmus) has little hope of improving social and political life" (Hankins 138). The disagreement between "More" and Raphael is not resolved; Book I ends with Raphael's connecting Plato's Republic with Utopia, the land he has just returned from, and whose society he will describe in detail in the following Book. Raphael's refusal to counsel a prince followed by his description of Utopia, a land without social rank and private property, implies that society cannot change by educating the powerful but only by a radical change. Starting from this debate in Book I of Utopia, critics point to irrevocable contradictions between Thomas More, the humanist idealist, and the public servant-the figure Stephen Greenblatt calls "Morus," citing the Latin name of the author used in Utopia-on embassy for Henry VIII, as told in the opening letter. More's life represents for Greenblatt "nothing less than this: the invention of a disturbingly unfamiliar form of consciousness... poised between engagement and detachment" (31). Emphasizing the gap between text and "lived reality" (3 I), Greenblatt argues that Raphael, a product of the rupture between "reality and selffashioning," stands between More and Morus, revealing within that identity "the signs of its own subversion or loss" (9). Biographers, like J. A. Guy, reading Utopia in light of More's life and service at the court of Henry VII, present More as a sycophantic courtier who concealed his wish to enter court employment even from his dear friend Erasmus. Another contradiction between More, the humanist, and Morus, the courtier, is emphasized by Richard Marius, who points out that during the time of the writing of Utopia, More had been sent to the Netherlands to negotiate the increase of commerce between the two countries, especially in wool. JJ In other words, he was promoting the interests and increasing the wealth of the English merchants, the emergent middle class, whom Raphael attacks in Book I of Utopia for their greed. In his iconoclastic biography of More, Marius portrays his political career through 1529, even while Speaker of the House of Commons, as that of a sycophant, a "loyal servant," concluding that More was "a cruelly divided man, tom between the necessity of making his way in the secular world and the devout longing to simplify life and to prepare his soul for the eternal world to come" (Biography 210, 391). Did More recognize these contradictions, when he placed himself in his text as a fictional character discussing the benefits of court service? More is both Morus and Hythlodaeus, evidenced by the similar significance of the two names; a "fool" (Greek) and an "expert in nonsense" (Latin), or Raphael Nonsenso, as Paul Tumer calls him in his

208

Efterpi Mitsi

translation of Utopia. More's subversion of his persona(s) is only part of his witty punning in the text: Utopia is a famously clever pun, if a discouraging one, as "Eutopia," the good place, is also "Outopia," a Noplace. Similarly, More's name unfolds into more than one meaning; More's Protestant enemies noted that it signified "black," like an African Moor (Prescott 227). His Latinized name not only recalls the Greek for "fool," "moron," but illustrates how More, renowned for his wit among his contemporaries, enjoyed foolery as well. 12 The wordplay culminates after considering the meaning of Raphael, Greek for "messenger from God" and Hebrew for "God has healed." While he promises divine salvation and healing, he is a messenger that cannot be trusted. Alike as "More" and Hythloday are, they are opposed. Also, despite the very real dilemma concerning the humanist's social and political role, the name of Utopia constantly reminds readers that what takes place here is a discussion about a no-place, a world created by a humanist's imagination and knowledge and one that More could control-unlike the real and dangerous world of European politics in which he had to navigate and by which he was eventually engulfed. Focusing on the ironies of the text, Louis Marin advises the reader that Utopia relates "in a different way to the historical and geographic world whose contradictory consciousness produced it" (57). For Marin, More emerges both as "a character in his book and, even belter, as a historically existing figure, as a real representation" (76). John Freeman offers a different interpretation, arguing that Utopia "corresponds very closely to the world in which More had to find his place; in fact, Book I represents both England and More's historical and biographical situations, and Book 11 offers an allegorization of those terms" (197). The two books, read together, offer for Freeman "a full presentation, if not an integration, of Thomas More." The contradictions of the text are not only the product of "a contradictory consciousness" but also raise the question of how a humanist might fashion himself, or how an author might construct his textual subjectivity as an amalgam of the private and the pUblic, the reflective and the active. Nowhere is the exact place where a discussion of an emergent subjectivity can be addressed. The citizens of Utopia with their complete lack of individualism, the denizens of the absolute communal life, become the topics of a discussion among intellectuals in the Netherlands in the era when the individual is being defined or 1J redefined. Hythloday, anticipating Moryson's definition of the humanist as a traveler, a student of human affairs and of human nature, brings an alternative vision of individuality from the New World where he has first sailed with Amerigo Vespucci.

The Utopian Humanist

209

In the beginning of the text, Raphael is portrayed as both a hermit/prophet and a sea captain/voyager, a "humanist student who benefits from the works of Plato and Cicero and from his Grand Tour" (Kinney 57). His return from a land of tolerance to a continent of conflict and intolerance marks him as a figure in between, unable to correct the ills of Europe through the lessons of Utopia, partly because of his own refusal to believe that he could influence a figure with political power. Hythloday is a stranger, an exile, neither here nor there. He refuses to serve a prince, arguing that philosophers need absolute freedom, the humanist has to remain true to his principles, and knowledge cannot inform power. Therefore, Raphael remains a critic whereas "More" is a player, a performer in the drama of public life, a statesman and diplomat, changing the course of history through his actions. All agree on the intellectual's difficulties in court. They disagree as to whether the value of the humanist's political activity is worth the sacrifice it entails, which suggests that More might still doubt entering royal service. 14 The characters' opposition depends not only on philosophical but also on political grounds. "More" was embarked upon a mission that represented the interests of English exporters of wool whereas Hythloday attacks those interests, as a man "both uprooted himself and an uprooter of others," whose pleas for reform "bristle with metaphors of deracination and eradication" (Sylvester 297). In service to the interests of royalty and the wool merchants, "More" confronts the spokesperson for the dispossessed yeomanry. Despite his pronouncement in the opening lines of Book I that King Henry had sent him to Flanders to settle a "rather serious difference of opinion" (15) between him and Prince Charles of Burgundy, in fact More was only a minor member of the diplomatic mission which had been sent in May ISIS to negotiate a new treaty governing the export of English wool and the sale of English cloth in Flanders (Lakowski). More's embassy thus represents a complicity between monarchy and merchants for the advantage of both, offering "yet another voice in the text's encoding of dissonant cultural interactions."ls Hythloday's radicalism, evident both in the defense of the less powerful and in the representation of Utopia, depends on the language of deracination, always present in the text. In Book 11, deracinations are both literal and figurative. Utopians deracinate entire forests, expel other people from their land to found colonies, and uproot ambition and greed from their society (Baker 14). The uprooted Raphael travels around the globe, from Europe to the New World and back, to acquire knowledge and to study humanity, whereas "More" travels to promote national and financial interests by way

210

Efterpi Mitsi

The Utopian Humanist

of fostering political and economic alliances. As the prefatory letter informs readers, "More" has written a book to disseminate Raphael's Utopia as the ideal society, the alternative to the injustice and corruption of Europe, expressing at the same time his objections to it and his doubts whether such a society is feasible. The last page of the text presents "More" (maybe More the author as well) unable to accept Utopia as a model for Europe,16 "exactly the reaction Hythloday (and Plato) predicted, from the unphilosophical" (Hankins 139). But while "More" is back at the court, practicing his "civilized" philosophy, Raphael is nowhere to be, found. Gilles writes in the prefatory letter that there are several different stories about him; some say he has died somewhere in his travels, others that he has returned to his own country and others to Utopia (12). Compared to both Ulysses and Plato (16), Raphael's constant movement (and to a certain extent that of his alter ego "More") foreshadows the predicament of the contemporary secular critic, defined by Said in Representations of the Intellectual, in his lecture entitled "Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals," as a state of continual transition and an ongoing negotiation of competing allegiances (49). For Said, the global critic observes and interprets the interaction of discourses and power structures, which determine cultural conflicts. Bruce Robbins describes Said's secular humanism as a "distinct version of internationalism" (26), comprising a global critical practice and a kind of displacement or exile. Robbins also stresses its relation to cosmopolitanism which, for Said, opposes the identity politics of nationalism. Secular criticism depends on "traveling," a word favored by Said. For Aamir Mufti, the concept of secular criticism is at the heart of the Saidian critical project; it is "a practice of unbelieLdirected, however, not simply at the objects of religious piety but at secular 'beliefs' as well" (I). In The World, the Text, and the Critic, in a chapter entitled "Secular Criticism," as well as in Said's introduction to a new edition of Mimesis, Erich Auerbach is understood as representative of the secular intellectual. Auerbach's interpretation of European literature is connected to the "circumstances of the book's actual writing," his exilic separation from his culture (and from his books) empowers his knowledge of them, re-enacting Raphael's fictional exile from and analysis of sixteenth-century Europe. Said saw Auerbach as "a figure of secular criticism in exile, a defender of literary worldliness in an era of cultural standardization," and recognized in his personal style of literary analysis, exemplified in Mimesis, "the mark of the human" (Apter 35, 53). Said's reception of Auerbach also combines the return to the "great works" and the "great writers" of literature with a vision of coexistence rather than division

between European and non-European cultures. In her analysis of Saidian humanism, Emily Apter argues that, in spite of humanism's association with Eurocentrism and Orientalism, Said adheres to "other humanisms"; to "emancipatory humanism," to "the ethics of coexistence" (based on humanism's synthetic approach to different cultures), and "to literature's ability to settle value on the human person" (35, 36). The displaced and stateless Auerbach functions as a model of a minority consciousness, both appealing and poignantly familiar to Said's own predicament. In his memoir Out of Place, as well as in other writings and interviews, Said opposes the claims of identity, the demands of an absolute national, ethnic and/or religious membership. Yet regardless of his insistence on the connections between criticism and exile, Said emphasizes that exile and separation do not ensure absolute freedom and independence. In Representations of the Intellectual, he argues that the popular assumption "that being exiled is to be totally cut off, isolated, hopelessly separated from your place of origin" is completely mistaken (48). Intellectuals are subject to the power structures that they criticize, to the operations of the nation-state, to the social and economic frameworks of institutions, universities and publishers. Even Raphael is subject to "More" and to his ironic "retelling" of the story in order to disseminate his utopian message. At the same time, the secular critic is aware of those power structures and fights against the imposition of national molds over society and culture. Said has praised the "pleasures of exile" as "those different arrangements of living and eccentric angles of vision that it can sometimes afford, which enliven the intellectual's vocation, without perhaps alleviating every last anxiety or feeling of bitter solitude" (59). However, as "More" tells Raphael, without a secure public positioning (the court in the sixteenth century and a professional, public or academic institution today) the intellectual will find it difficult to speak to a broad audience. Despite the benefits that the margins and exile offer, thinkers will find it hard to fight for the "poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented" (113), for all the causes to which Said's intellectuals are committed. Instead of an attempt to violently yoke together two very different thinkers and humanists, the reading of More's representation of the sixteenth-century humanist's internal tensions, irreconcilabilities and dilemmas through Said's thoughts on contemporary intellectuals' responsibility aims at a recovery and implicit redefinition of the term humanism. More and Said are connected through the politics of utopia. Neither Raphael nor "More" fully incarnate the model of utopian humanism emerging from Utopia. A utopian humanist bridges the intellectual with the political, assumes a public voice without betraying

211

212

Efterpi Mitsi

The Utopian Humanist

hislher principles, and is engaged with the dominant order while recognizing its coercive capabilities. Although sixteentb-century Europe may seem a very distant world, it was More and other Renaissance humanists that showed the nearer to the status quo the thinker is, the farther he finds himself froD] the space of f.·ee thinking, ingenuity and crilique. The concerns raised in Utopia, making the world more just and humane---Iistening to the voices from the margins not just at the center of' power, and imagining alternative ways of living and organizing societies-are as urgent today as they were in the sixteenlh century. Recognizing the pact between humanism and imperialism especially in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shouldn't lead to the rejection of the valuable heritage of humanism, of More, Vico, and Auerbach's humanisms among others. Said's work has emphasized that the critical exploration of literature rather than resolving tensions and discontinuities can only raise more questions:

intellectual to be an agenl of change appears incompalible with the cynicism of the contemporary world; More, no Utopian himself, might suggest an answer to Ihis objection. Although at the end of the book Raphael disappears and "More" remains unconvinced about Utopia as a plausible alternative to European society, what matters, finally, is that the story is told. Despite his doubts, "More" reproduces Raphael's voice; a book is written and published, an idea is disseminated, and a new genre (and a dream) is born.

The central fact for me [writes Said] is that the intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public. And this role has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than produce them). (Representations I I) At the end of Utopia, the tension between Raphael and "More," Utopia and Europe is not resolved. Rather than untangling Plato's paradox, More, who believes that a radical social reform has no hope for success in modem Europe, creates one of his own: states cannot reform until their rulers improve, yet rulers cannot improve, until states are in their best condition. 17 Readers should interrogate More's ironies with the critical and skeptical attitude of the humanist tradition, the author's legacy. Similarly, Said's legacy addresses the same disturbing questions that persist in the world today. Skeptical toward the institutions of power and committed to the embattled and disenfranchised communities, Said has voiced a powerful argument, convincing because of his commitment to a moral high ground. The humanist's struggle is both human and humane, a solitary stand against the decline and negation of human ideals. Said's Humanism and Democratic Criticism makes an impassioned appeal for allowing the lessons of the past to be accessible to the present. The disagreement between Raphael and "More" investigates the problem of the humanist's public role, a question that Said confronted in his life and work. For certain readers, Said's belief in the capacity of the

213

Notes I Utopia and utopian thought, which is a secular variety of social thought, is a western tradition. Although other varieties of the perfect condition of humanity exist in non-western cultures, they are usually embedded in religious cosmologies. See Kumar p.33-35. 2 Although Utopia suggests a ''No-place'' or ''Nowhere'' characterized by its opposition to a "real place," the emergence of utopian writing, a new genre of literary and political expression, is clearly related to the geographical discoveries of Columbus and the explorers who followed him (and by extension to colonization). Hythlodaeus, the character who describes Utopia in More's book, is presented as the companion of Amerigo Vespucci on three of his four voyages, the explorer who "gave" his name to the newfound lands. Vespucci was the first to identifY the newly discovered lands as a new continent, "a Mundus Novus." J Edward Said has written extensively on Vico. See in particular, Said's Beginnings: Intention and Method 1985: 345-382. Critics such as Bruce Robbins and Timothy Brennan have discussed the importance of Vico in Said's work. See Robbins, Secular Vocations (1994), Brennan, "Places of Mind, Occupied Lands: Edward Said and Philology," (74-95) and "The Illusion of a Future: Orientalism as Traveling Theory," (558-583). See also W.J.T. Mitchell, "Secular Divination: Edward Said's Humanism." Additionally, see Rubin in Arab Studies Quarterly , "Human beings will act for the sake of their own particular ends, but the socialized nature of those ends will bring about unforeseen changes in society itself. Historically, society evolves in cycles from one governed by imagination, superstition, and custom to one governed by rational understanding and that, in turn, declines into a society governed by imagination; in a parallel fashion, the political nature of society evolves from anarchy to oligarchy and then to democracy and monarchy, and finally declines to anarchy." See Costelloe, especially par 1106). 5 The postmodern replacement of the unitary concept of "Man" is the "subject": gendered, de-centered, fragmentary, historically and socially conditioned and no longer self-determining (see Davies). 6 I find Davies' concluding remark, "Others will tell us if we are human, and what that means," rather problematic. Should the recognition of the Eurocentrism of

214

Efterpi Mitsi

The Utopian Humanist

215

Works Cited humanism lead Europeans (if I read this statement correctly) to the abdication of any responsibility in redefining it? Isn't this division (us versus them) part of the' discourse Davies attacks throughout the book? 7 On what most specialists would call Renaissance humanism, see the work of Paul Kristeller and more recently the essays in the Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, edited by Jill Kraye and Charles G, Nauert, Jr.'s, ,

Humanism and the Culture ofRenaissance Europe. 8 To distinguish between More, the author of the text, and the More persona in the text, I will refer to latter as "More," 9 I am quoting from Paul Turner's translation of Utopia (first published in 1965), from the Penguin Classics 2003 edition, All subsequent references from this edition will be given in brackets after the quotations, 10 On Ciceroniam humanism see Pincombe 2001, chapter 2, II In his extensive biography of More, Marius asserts that More was not really a humanist at all; he opposes the traditional interpretation of Utopia as the main text of English Renaissance humanism, arguing that it thematically belongs in medieval times, since it reveals not More's brilliance, but rather his "heavy-handed" and "puritanical" ways (167), However, the critical consensus, which I share, is that "Thomas More shou Id be classed as a Renaissance humanist: his professional employments, cultural style and the range of problems he addresses all clearly identify him as such" (Hankins 137) and that Utopia is "the early masterpiece of Tudor humanist poetics" (Kinney 57), 12 Anne Prescott points out that More at one point, like other important statesmen, even employed a fool and wonders: "if we cannot entirely trust Hythloday, speaker of nonsense, can we trust Master Moron? A Moron who is as impressed by mere magnificence and glory as are the worldly fools in the work of his friend Erasmus?" (227), Critics like Kinney and Prescott point out that Erasmus' Praise of Folly, [Encomium Moriae] , written at More's house at the Old Barge, Bucklersbury, is also a pun on "More" and could be translated as "In Praise of More" (Kinney 44), 13 It is significant that the forum for Utopia is neither the people (the text is written in Latin and More expressed concerns that it might be misconstrued if translated in the vernacular) nor the court but what Baker calls "an Erasmian community of friends" (53), 14 In the note to his translation of Utopia, Turner refers to More's letters to Erasmus in 1516, which indicate an internal conflict about his royal service (125nI4), Also, as Kristeller points out, although More had served the King in various occasions, he hesitated for several years before accepting a permanent office (7), 15 See John Freeman's essay, 16 "".I cannot agree with everything that he said, for all his undoubted learning and experience, But I freely admit that there are many features of the Utopian Republic which I should like - though I hardly expect to see adopted in Europe," (113) 17 See Hankins' piece on Humanism in Kraye's Cambridge Companion p, 139,

Apter, Emily, "Saidian Humanism," boundary 2 31.1 (2004): 35-53, Baker, David WeiL Divulging Utopia: Radical Humanism in SixteenthCentury England. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999, Baldrick, Christopher. "Humanism," The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press, 1996. University of Athens. http://www.oxfordreference.com!views/ENTRY.html (12 June 2007) Brennan, Timothy. "Places of Mind, Occupied Lands: Edward Said and Philology." Edward Said: A Critical Reader, Ed. Michael Sprinker. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992.74-95 _. "The lIIusion of a Future: Orientalism as Traveling Theory." Critical Inquiry 26 (Spring 2000): 558-583. Costelloe, Timothy, "Giambattista Vico," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2007 Edition), Ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edularchives/win2007/entries/vico (10 September 2007) Davies, Tony. Humanism. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Freeman. John. "More's Place in 'No Place': The Self-Fashioning Transaction in Utopia." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 34 (1992): 197-217. http://gracewoodO.tripod.com!freemanmore.html (2 July 2007) Greenblatt, Stephen Jay. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Guy, John. Thomas More. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Hankins, James. "Humanism and the Origins of Modem Political Thought." The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism. Ed. Jill Kraye. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kinney, Arthur F. Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986. Kraye, Jill. ed. The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1996. _. Renaissance Thought and Its Sources. Ed. Michael Mooney. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. _. "Thomas More as a Renaissance Humanist." Moreana 65-66 (1980): 5-22.

217

Efterpi Mitsi

The Utopian Humanist

Kumar, Krishan. Utopianism, Concepts in the Social Sciences. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991. Lakowski, Romuald Ian. Sir Thomas More and the Art of Dialogue. HTML Edition Early Modern Literary Studies, 1995, 1996, 1997 http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/emls/iemls/work/chapters/lakowski.html Leach, Sir Edmund. "Humanism." The Oxford Companion to the Mind. Richard L. Gregory. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. University of Athens, 1987. http://www.oxfordreference.comlviews/ENTRY.html(12 June 2007) Marin, Louis. Utopics: Spatial Play. Trans. Robert A. Vollrath. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1984. Marius, Richard. Thomas More: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1984. - . "Utopia as Mirror for a Life and Times." Early Modern Literary Studies 2 Mar. 1995: 90 pars. (15 Jan 2007). Mitchell, W.J.T. "Secular Divination: Edward Said's Humanism." Critical Inquiry 31 (2005): 462-471. More, Sir Thomas. Utopia [1516]. Trans. Paul Turner. London: Penguin Classics, 2003. Moryson, Fynes. An Itinerary. London, 1617. Mufti, Aamir. "Critical Secularism: A Reintroduction for Perilous Times." Boundary 2 31.2 (2004): 1-9. Nauert, Charles G., Jr. Humanism and the Culhlre ofRenaissance Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pincombe, Mike. Elizabethan Humanism: Literature and Learning in the later Sixteenth Century. Harlow and London: Longman, 2001. Prescott, Anne Lake. 2003. "Postmodern More." Moreana 40.153-154: 219-238. Robbins, Bruce. Secular Vocations. New York: Verso, 1994. Rubin, Andrew. "Edward W. Said (1935-2003)." Arab Studies Quarterly 26.4 (2004): 37-55. Said, Edward W. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. -. Beginnings: Intention and Method New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. -. Representations ofthe Intellectual. New York, Pantheon Books, 1994. -. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Sylvester, Richard S. "Si Hythlodaeo Credimus." Essential Articles for the Study of Thomas More. Eds. G. P. Marc'Hadour and R. S. Sylvester Sylvester, R. S. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1977

Touraine, Alain. "Society as Utopia." Utopia. The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World. Eds Roland Schaer, Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent. New York, Oxford: New York Public Library/Oxford University Press, 2000. 18-31. Vico, Gianbattista. Scienza nuova seconda. The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Revised translation of the third edition by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1948; Cornell Paperbacks, 1976. Yoran, Hanan. "Thomas More's Richard III: Probing the Limits of Humanism." Renaissance Studies 15.4 (2000): 514-537.

216

PART III: THE GLOBAL HYBRID AND THE CALL FOR CRITIQUE: RETHINKING THE HUMAN AND HER/HIS ABODE

Ethical Antihumanism

CHAPTER NINE ETHICAL ANTIHUMANISM SAMIRDAYAL

Since 1989 at least, nationalism and ethnic identity have become urgent questions once again, not least powerfully in Europe. The resurgence of virulent ethnonationalisms and the putatively universal victory of democratic capitalism both raise the question of why "the revolutionary imagination" seems everywhere in retreat in a postcolonial (and even neocolonial) era. Frantz Fanon had written in The Wretched of the Earth, the last book he published before his death in 1961, that after political decolonization, the colonial structure "puts on the mask of neocolonialism" (152). Yet the retreat might also be an opportunity to reflect on past exemplars of the revolutionary imagination and, in the spirit of reculer pour mieux sauter, to ask what conditions are necessary for fostering emancipatory practices. We are witnessing a new and acute crisis of Western modernity and its anchor, Western Man. In the wake of this crisis, the subject's constitution as citizen needs to be rethought. Yet the call for a rethinking of the status of the citizen/subject, of the meaning of agency, is particularly urgent in the context of the encroaching forces of a globalized "empire"-in the formulation of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, empire being neither merely a contemporary inheritor of "conspiratorial" European imperialism nor a mere "invisible hand" reaching across the globe. In the words of Tsenay Serequeberhan, "[m]ore than through physical force, EuroAmerica today rules through its hegemony of ideas" (156) as well as through its economic hegemony and the predominance of its institutions such as the form of the nation, the notion of civil society, and development. It is the critique of European (Eurocentric) humanism that remains the crucial task for postcolonial and cultural critics. I argue in this paper that Frantz Fanon provides a model for the proleptic deconstruction,

221

even destruction, of that humanism in order to reappropriate it in a regenerate form in a future that has not yet arrived. But rather than regarding this as an empty utopianism for a future that will never arrive, I suggest that it produces a structure of ethical antihumanism in the present, and that this intermediate structure already offers lessons for ethical thought and agency. What would it mean to reimagine a new citizen subject in a transnational frame, a new "Man"? Setting aside for the moment the potentially sexist undertones of such a formulation, it would be difficult to find a more provocative or productive point of departure for such a rethinking of European humanism than Fanon's proleptic and prescient goal to "set afoot a new Man," for "Europe, for ourselves and for humanity," as he put it at the end of The Wretched of the Earth (316). While this particular rallying cry was expressed in the year of his death (1961), it was only a moment in a career-long philosophical/ontological project that remains worthy of attention today. In his oeuvre, Fanon's emphasis often fell on the question of the subject-the social and political dimension of citizenship as well the psychic complexities of the unconscious. The political, one might say, was inextricable not only from the personal but from the psychological. In Black Skin. White Masks (1952), he outlined his ambition to intervene in history by decreating, destroying "Negro" and white man as twinned epistemological categories so as to allow the posthumanist, postcolonial emergence of that "new Man.,,1 Black Skin, White Masks (henceforth BSWM), illustrates his disillusionment with liberal humanism though in a language that does not emphasize death and arbitrariness in quite so apocalyptic and entropic a discourse as Achille Mbembe's; nevertheless, we should be alert to its formidable negative potency. BSWM most evocatively presents a fascinating example of a Caribbean intellectual's meditation on the problem of the black subject. But it is not without its conundrums. There is, for instance, an element of disavowal in his elective affinity with the Algerian struggle for identity: he seemed to have identified himself completely with the virile anticolonial struggle in Algeria while at the same time distancing himself from the comparable movement in Martinique, his home. Fran90ise Verges has described this as his disidentification with the Caribbean past of slavery.2 Yet this "alienation" is not evidence of merely a kind of bad faith, but an overdetermined and deliberate act of diasporization, energized by a tremendous psychic investment in the disavowal.

222

SamirDayal

I. The Psychic Dimension in Fanon: Disarticulating and Deconstructing the Colonized Subject No account of Fanon's theory of subjectivity can afford to ignore its psychic dimensions. Stuart Hall has observed appositely that the "grain of BSWM runs incontrovertibly towards the recognition that an account of, racism which has no purchase on the inner landscape and the unconscious mechanisms of its effects is, at best, only half the story" (17). Even Ato Sekyi-Otu, a critic more interested in an overtly political ("African-' situationist") interpretation and less committed to emphasizing the psychic dimensions of the struggle inscribed in Fanon's project, finds he cannot ignore that dimension even though he seeks to minimize its significance. Sekyi-Otu admits that he wants to "elicit from Fanon's texts a normative vision" on "urgent questions of the postindependence world: questions of class, ethnicity, and gender, of democracy and human rights, against assertions of cultural particularity" (3). He acknowledges that while clinical psychology and a "psychoanalytically informed study and treatment of psychopathology" were the "object of Fanon's professional work" he himself treats Fanon's "psychological and psychoanalytic observations rather allusively" (5). Sekyi-Otu seems to believe that the alternative is what Hussein Bulhan labeled "psychological reductionism" (6); but in doing so he is mounting a straw man argument, attacking a drastically scotomized view of the psychoanalytic enterprise: The ur-concept of psychoanalysis, the unconscious...provokes this veritable [Fanonian] apostasy: "Then there is the unconscious. Since the racial drama is played out in the open, the black man has no time to "make it unconscious." The white man, on the other hand, succeeds in doing so to a certain extent, because a new element appears: guilt. The Negro's inferiority or superiority complex or feeling of equality is conscious. These feelings forever chill him. They make his drama. In him there is none of the affective amnesia characteristic of the typical neurotic." (7; Fanon qtd. from BSWM 150) If anything, what Sekyi-Otu manages to demonstrate here is Fanon's thorough investment in the categories of psychoanalysis in the analysis of "sociogeny" and of the political as such. Sekyi-Otu's analytic is hobbled by the misapprehension that a distinction between unconscious and conscious processes disables the psychoanalytic approach. On the contrary, psychoanalysis-and in particular the Lacanian school of psychoanalysis in which Fanon was trained and to which he refers on

Ethical Antihumanism

223

several occasions-depends for its power on precisely such distinctions between conscious processes and unconscious fantasies, or "the symbolic" and "the unconscious." Ultimately, despite his resistance to the "psychologizing reading of Fanon," Sekyi-Otu doubtless recognizes that some of the choices of prose form made by Fanon were themselves dictated by the fact that "the colonial experience by its very nature [made] a narrativist account of its meaning well-nigh impossible" (4). Does this mean that the form of Fanon's prose precludes a cogent reflection on the condition of the black man? Certainly not. Insofar as it had a conscious, theoretical dimension, Fanon's work was concerned with deconstructing the colonized subject radically, even if it meant disarticulating the subject with no guarantee or immediate prospect of that subject's postcolonial reconstitution. Fanon's thematic of depersonalization and dehumanization constitutes an engagement with (European) humanism. I acknowledge a measure of sympathy with Sekyi-Otu's ambition to reconstruct Fanon in the image of "revolutionary humanism" (3), but only in the sense of a critical engagement with the traditions of universalist humanism. My argument has greater affinity with Michael Azar's observation that "Fanon's dialectic [of the movement of the spirit of humanism] involves both learning and transcendence from Europe, both a critique of humanism and an emphasis on its necessity..." (22). But unlike Azar, I suggest that Fanon's position is continuous with a strategic antihumanism. If Fanon's strategy is antihumanism, then a key intermediate moment, or tactic, is "dehumanization"-and dehumanization itself may be an intermediate ethical move, given that (Eurocentric, Enlightenment) "Humanism" is psychically injurious to those who are denied full agency and indeed denied their humanity, as it evolved amongst the most privileged groups in Euro-American metropolitan centers. Its historical influence on reigning conceptions of "modernity" gives cause for humanism to be engaged rather than discounted by Fanon. He recognizes that it is a question of a struggle for human as well as political agency, and thus in the psychoanalytic sense, too, affords an ethics of the subject. As he closes The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon makes an impassioned ethical plea, a counterweight to the prayer that ends BSWM. "Leave this Europe," he writes, "where they are never done talking of Man, yet Murder men everywhere they [rod them, at the comer of every one of their own streets, in all the comers of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience" (311). It is the outrageousness of the (tacit) premise of Eurocentric and particularly Enlightenment humanism that the black "savage" is exterior to humanity proper that explains ultimately why

224

SamirDayal

Ethical Antihumanism

Fanon's answer is framed in commensurate outrage: a new humanism requires the destruction of "Man" first, before it can be reconstructed in some future as yet imagined. What is the connection between the philosophical understanding of depersonalization and the political aspect of dehumanization? The connection is at the level of psychic life, without being limited to the individual. Fanon insisted on a psychoanalytic frame, naturally enough, , but understood clearly that the individual psychic structure and the collective social structure must enter the analytic frame together: "the black man must wage his war on both levels" (Wretched II). We must be careful not to accept the universalizing tendency of some psychoanalytic pronouncements, and 1 would concede to Sekyi-Otu that it would be wrong to impute a primacy to the "psychic and the psychological" (8). It is no part of my argument that Fanon attributes a hierarchy of the psychic dimension over the social, historical or political (dimensions which have to do with social or communal life). Indeed I argue to the contrary, and incidentally pace Homi Bhabha in "Remembering Fanon," that it is not the privileging of the psychic dimension but the reticulation of these registers that lends force to Fanon's linkage of the individual and the collective. This being understood in any account of the articulation of the individual and the collective chez Fanon, it would not be a great exaggeration to say that he was obsessed with the depersonalization of the black man at the level of the subject's psychic life. Linking the political, historical (colonial) and the ontological dimensions of a critique of humanism, he wrote that

splitting, a doubling within himself; this is the meaning of black skin, white masks.] The black man is masked not only for public consumption, and not only for the white other to constitute himself as white. He is masked also from himself. Yet whenever he approaches himself in the mirror, he meets only the surface of the mask, not an imaginary authentic self with an immaculate original anchored in the autochthonous past. No wonder Fanon conceived the deconstruction of the black man's subjectivity as a "descent into a real hell," into a "zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born" (BSWM 10). This "upheaval of authenticity" should not be construed in the contemporary multiculturalist discourse of a politics of identity but as an "authentic upheaval" in the Sartrianl Existential idiom regnant in Fanon's own time and intellectual space, where authenticity derives its validity from the very fact that it is premised on the deconstitution of inauthentic being, where subjectivity derives its "authenticity" from a kind of ethical fealty to the ontic condition of the black man's profane condition. For, in the now admittedly obsolete idiom of Existentialism, which nevertheless speaks a certain truth today, the (authentic) black man is not yet. The black man is not yet properly constituted-{)r is not yet truly visible except as the shadow of the white man-{)utside the false polarity of blackness and whiteness promulgated in Eurocentric universalism, so this polarity must first be deconstructed or destroyed. This is a point more recently articulated in the context of Africa itself by Achille Mbembe: "[m]ore than any other region, Africa...stands out as the supreme receptacle of the West's obsession with, and circular discourse about, the facts of 'absence,' 'lack,' and 'non-being,' of identity and difference, of negativeness-in short, of nothingness" (4). Again, we may note in passing the persistence, in the rhetoric of even this contemporary observer and impassioned theorist of Africa, of the "obsolete" categories of the Existentialist idiom. But what were the mechanics of Fanon's projected destruction, seen from his Existentialist, postcolonial perspective? By the time he had committed himself (between 1956 and 1961) to the Algerian anticolonial Revolution, spearheaded by the Front de Liberation National (FLN), Fanon had become convinced that the destruction of the white colonizer could not remain a pretty metaphor. Colonialism, as his observation, reading, and reflection had increasingly impressed upon him, is "violence in its natural state and it will yield only when confronted with greater violence" (Wretched 48).4 We must of course always be careful not to suggest that violence is the only possible form of resistance under

[ilf psychiatry is the medical technique that aims to enable man no longer to be a stranger to his environment, lowe it to myself to affirm that the Arab, permanently an alien in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization.... The social structure existing in Algeria was hostile to any attempt to put the individual back where he belonged. (Toward 53) Therefore, before the "absolute depersonalization" of the black person could be achieved on the way to full political agency, the black man had to be psychically liberated from "himself' as constituted within the discourse of humanism-an ultimately inauthentic self, occupying a zone of occultation in which he could be only the perennially raced "other" and never be fully recognized as a man (BSWM 10). His very body had to be made unrecognizable to the black man himself in a "complete lysis of this morbid [black] body" (BSWM 10). This required not only confronting the traumatic specularity in which the black man recognizes an internal

225

226

227

SamirDayal

Ethical Antihumanism

occupation: the recent withdrawal of Israel from zones it has occupied in Lebanon without a shot being fired (as Israel's former Prime Minister Ehud Barak boasted) suggests at least that it is possible to negotiate without resort to violence. But in his historical context one can perhaps see why Fanon pointed up the persistence of epistemic violence that extends beyond historical or actual colonization, a violence that could only be responded to in the language of violence. Fanon predicated decolonization on an antihumanism that might produce a completely new, and as yet indescribable, entity, not yet~ recognizable as a human being because there is no absolute referent and no satisfactory historical precedent except, perhaps, a precolonial black man. But that was almost prehistory, as far as philosophical and psychoanalytical theories went. So the only option, from the perspective of the postcolonial Fanon, was that decolonization would entail "quite simply the replacing of a certain 'species' of human beings by another 'species' of human beings" (Wretched 27). It is worth reminding ourselves that Fanon does not dwell on what exactly this other species of human beings would be, and he certainly does not state unambiguously that it would entail a reversion to an older, precolonial authenticity. The only thing he is unequivocally clear about is that the extant form must be deconstructed in preparation for the dawn of the new Man. While of course there is a distinction between the Martinican reference of the black man of BSWM and the Arab reference of the black man of The Wretched of the Earth, and certainly Fanon as clinical psychologist would have remarked that the pathologies presenting themselves in the two contexts of say Martinique and Algeria cannot be quite the same, it remains true today as in Fanon's time that these distinctions were transcended by European universalism at the level at which it purveyed its racialist logic of differential cultural progress, or modernity, or the mission civilisatrice. With this qualification it may be argued that there was a continuity in Fanon's reflections on race, which were intended to be a response to the European notion of a universal "Man." Fanon's new Man would (and I use the conditional advisedly) be the product, presumably, of a calculated, cataclysmic violence, and his postcatastrophic resurgence will therefore be coeval with the "rise of a new nation, the setting up of a new state, its diplomatic relations, and its economic and political trends" (Wretched 35). Some observers have suggested, however, that when Fanon speaks of the conditions for the advent of the new Man he underplays the prospect of the collective (social, national, transnational) regeneration of the colonized. Neil Lazarus acutely observes that at the level of the collective, Fanon is unclear about whether a decolonized

future entails the rebirth of a precolonial sociality. This ambiguity may be due to the fact that Fanon was not sure whether a democratic future would in effect return us to historical (precolonial) forms of subjectivity and civil society. Indeed Lazarus suggests that Fanon may have harbored an unfounded pessimism about the possibility of a colonized people's resurgence, given the degree to which all cultures have interpenetrated other cultures. But if the hybridization of cultures has obliterated its pure, "authentic" origin, there remains the question: was there ever such an entity as an autotelic and autochthonous "black Man"? Fanon's thinking about the necessity for a deconstructive and antisystemic violence was likely influenced by Sartre, who addressed the issue in his own preface to The Wretched of the Earth when he observed that "we in Europe too are being decolonized... the settler which is in every one of us is being savagely rooted out. ... [W]e must face that unexpected revelation, the strip-tease of our humanism. ... It was nothing but an ideology of lies" (21). If Fanon argued that the black man had first to be "destroyed," he would have found in Sartre an echo of the idea that it was because of his positionality, his sociocultural and historical-structural location, that the black man had to be figuratively "destroyed," before a possible reconstruction. 5 Sartre saw that "black men have fixed their gaze upon us and our own gaze is thrown back in our eyes" (Black Orpheus 21).6 As a general principle, Sartre pointedly distinguished between oppression and violence, in reference to slavery in the U.S.: "Violence...cannot be defined apart from some relation to the laws that it violates (human or natural laws). It represents a suspending of these laws" (Notebooks 561). In other words, it suspends the frame of universalism. On the contrary, he says, oppression can be fully "institutional" in that it is given legitimacy de jure. Sartre points out however that violence cannot be understood except as historicized. Contextualizing his remarks by referring to the twilight of the colonial period (he wrote the Notebooks between 1947 and 1948, and the appendix in which this discussion appears was probably intended for inclusion in these "notebooks"), he observes that violence has "changed its direction. When we were victorious we practiced it without its seeming to alter us; it broke down the others, but for us men our humanism remained intact. ... [T]oday violence, blocked everywhere, comes back on us through our soldiers, comes inside and takes possession of us. Involution starts; the native recreates himself, and we, settlers and Europeans, ultras and liberals, we break up" (Sartre, "Preface" 28). The punctuating temporality of decolonization is coded into Sartre's remarks, but it can also be seen in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Preface to

228

SamirDayal

Humanism and Terror. Also writing in 1947 (a watershed moment for decolonization in South Asia that also adumbrated spasms of decolonization in other "non-Western" peripheries, including the Caribbean and Africa), Merleau-Ponty reflected that liberal principles, a mainstay of European humanism, "today... [serves] to justify military suppression in Indochina [an outpost of French colonialism] or in Palestine and the development of American empire in the Middle East" (xiii). Explicitly following Marx, who had described liberal ideas as part of a system of violence, Merleau-Ponty goes so far as to assert that the very "material and moral culture of England presupposes the exploitation of the colonies. The purity of principles not only tolerates but even requires violence. Thus there is a mystification in liberalism" (xiii). Indeed, for Merleau-Ponty, "the essential task of Marxism is to [md a violence which recedes with the approach of man's future" (xviii). In the meantime violence remains necessary because "in advocating nonviolence one reinforces established violence, or a system of production which makes misery and war inevitable" (xviii). From a Marxist perspective there is Iiberatory potential in violence, and Fanon borrowed a page from Marx to entertain the idea of precisely this kind of liberatory violence being necessary to deconstruct the system in which the black man is yoked violently to the white man and subsequently to regenerate the New Man in the future. This furnishes the rationale for what I am calling Fanon's ethical antihumanism: the necessity not only to dismantle an oppressive ontological category but also to enable the constitution of a new subject. As Merleau-Ponty wrote, "This is what Marx believed he had found in proletarian violence, namely, the power of that class of men who, because they are expropriated in present society from their country, their labor, and their very life, are capable of recognizing one another aside from all differences, and thus of founding humanity" (xviii). Merleau-Ponty was no less a lodestar of Fanon's intellectual cosmos than Sartre. Fanon's debt to him was set forth in lapidary form in the title of the concluding chapter of Peau noires. masques blancs, the French original of BSWM: "L 'Experience vecue du nair" should be read, as many have observed, as a direct reference to the French phenomenologist.

II. European Humanism, Universalism and Fanon's Ethical Humanism My argument so far has intended to emphasize in part that Fanon's association of decolonization with violence had a radically reconstructive

Ethical Antihumanism

229

dimension. According to Fanon, "[w]ithout any period of transition, there is a total, complete and absolute substitution.... Decolonization is the veritable creation of new men" (Wretched 27-28). Yet violence itself should not be ascribed to the black man as the predictable recourse of those who cannot achieve their own freedom through rational and democratic process, for that would be only a covert racialism, ultimately reinscribing the justificatory logics of colonialism. It is not that the black man is constitutively incapable of rationality or democracy; for his very constitution is constructed by the complex historical feature of colonialism: "it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence. The sellier owes the fact of his very existence, that is to say, his property, to the colonial system" (28). For this logic of subject constitution again Fanon owes something to Sartre who, in Being and Nothingness, had written of the power of the "Other" to transform the "I" into an object, even to make the "I" an agent of his own self-objectification; thus Sartre had anticipated the reciprocal dimension of objectification that Fanon echoes-the "Other" is also constituted in this objectifying system.' Just as the status of the Jew is exceptional in Sartre's thought-the Jew is situationally fixed; he cannot not occupy the position of the JewS-the black man is "held to authenticity...he accepts the word 'Negro' which is hurled at him as an epithet, and revendicates himself, in pride, as black in the face of white" (Black Orpheus 15). In any case, the system of mutual dependence between the white man and the black man is symptomatic of the sickness of Western humanism. Sartre again had anticipated Fanon in recognizing that that abstract liberal humanism effectively constituted the marginalization of those minorities who ironically were constitutive of the dominant social order, since they allowed the Other to define himself against them as normative, universal principle. But what is different then about Fanon's project? One of the major differences is that while Sartre argues, in classic Existentialist fashion, for a resistance based on a resistant and even subversive "authenticity" (AntiSemite 137) counterposed to the Other's humanist universal subject, Fanon wanted to undo this "manicheism delirium," to eradicate this oppressive reciprocity (tolerated under the sign of "universalism" and "humanism") that is no more than an epidermalized pairing of identities. This reciprocity has little to do with authenticity and rather preempts it. Indeed authenticity is made difficult if not impossible for a colonized black man by a "psycho-existential complex" (BSWM 8, 12), and it is, as I suggest in this essay, almost as though Fanon were arguing that in the colonized black man's situation, it is not yet possible to imagine such a

230

SamirDayal

positivity as an "authentic" black manhood re-epidermalized in a far-off utopia. Fanon, writing BSWM in 1952, five years before Albert Memmi's The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957), was the more farsighted of the two because he recognized that "authenticity" could not be embraced without ambivalence. Memmi argued with less nuance for a "recovery of the self and of autonomous dignity" (128). Fanon saw that the black man who proclaims a precolonial, preconstituted or primordialist authenticity would be condemned to misrecognition at best, since "what is often called the black is a white construction" (BSWM 14) and there is, for Fanon, no way not to speak in the abstract humanist language of the colonizer. First the black-and the white-man must be eradicated. Michael Azar points to Fanon's "hermeneutics of eradication" and the supporting "dream of total liberation, of a subjectivity beyond Otherness" (31), but what needs to be added to Azar's conceptualizations is that the political violence is ultimately in the service of an epistemological violence construed in a reversal of Gayatri Spivak's sense: here, the epistemological violence is precisely a kind of purgatorial fire, violence done to epistemological ossifications or embodiments, invidious categories of being-black and white, black versus white. This salutory epistemological violence would bum away the carapace of whiteness that Sartre regards as a privilege the white man has enjoyed for three thousand years. Sartre now sees that the "black men have fixed their gaze upon us and our own gaze is thrown back in our eyes." It is important to recognize the specific genealogy of the crisis of European Man, which Lewis Gordon traces through Nietzsche's death of God and Husserl's Crisis o/the European Sciences. And since "Man," the Master signifier of humanism, has become a sick if not dead old man, an epistemic violence directed at the verities of Western humanism is part of a necessary dissidence against it. The projected reconstitution of the subject could only be realized, ironically, by what might be called an ethical antihumanism: an attack on the normative "Man" of humanism. This requires more than returning to an authentic African past or fmding a new pride in "negritude"; for if it is "the white man who creates the Negro," it is the "Negro who creates negritude" (Fanon, Dying 47)-and the form of authenticity produced as authentically "Negro" is the stereotype of the savage who dances, sings, practices "black" arts, is oversexed and uncouth in all (Fanon, BSWM 122-3). In what sense does the white man create the black? In his analysis of slavery, Sartre interestingly develops a radical ambiguity. The white man in the American South of 1808, writes Sartre, would have been born into a world which hinged on the "ensemble" of the

Ethical Antihumanism

231

"law" which rendered the black man subhuman, categorized him as necessarily the slave. On the other hand, Sartre points out, was the "law of the heart," which persisted. The legitimation of slavery under the universalist humanism was undermined by the fact that the white man could not hide from his own recognition that "the two races were united by concrete ties," and his recognition of "how concrete his knowledge of the black was, a practical knowledge that came from a hundred years of rule, in opposition to that purely abstract and puritan idea of human nature that one found in men of the North"-the abstract idea of human nature, that is to say, that forms the bedrock of universalist humanism. There was also a species of intimate exceptionalism that exploded this universalist idea of human nature, for Sartre points out that these "concrete ties" between the master and the slave "were clearly limited to the slave in the mansion or in the city." And at this juncture Sartre produces a sturming aper9u: he writes that "the domestic slave, born in the mansion, is the property of his master, his thing. And the master loves him as such a prolongation of himself. He loves him and takes care of him inasmuch as he acknowledges being made/or the master" (Notebooks 564-565). This strange economy, in which the slave is the constitutive object for the master, in which the slave is the master's "thing" and a prosthetic "prolongation of himself' (like a fetish, or analogous to the phallus) certainly evokes a psychoanalytic discourse for a contemporary reader of Lacan-and we might remember that Fanon was a reader of Lacan even if he did not always read Lacan in the way he is read within the circles of contemporary high theory, or even in the way high theory sometimes assimilates Fanon to Lacan. Fanon developed Sartre's insight about what Lacan might call the "extimacy" of black man and white man. They were not only mutually constitutive: there is no white man unless there is a black man; it is certainly inadequate to posit the white man ab initio as a singularity, a normative self-sufficiency after which the black man modeled himself and always found himself wanting. It was also true-and Ihis is what 1 argue Fanon demonstrates powerfully-that no understanding of the political can begin to be adequate without a simultaneous effort to understand the psychic dimension of politicized relationships such as that between white and black, master and slave, or colonizer and colonized. Does this mean that the form of Fanon's prose precludes a cogently non-psychoanalytic reflection on the condition of the black man? Of Course not. Even read as straightforwardly sociopolitical discourse, Fanon's writing was concerned with deconstructing the colonized subject radically, even if it meant disarticulating the subject with no guarantee or

232

SamirDayal

immediate prospect of that subject's postcolonial reconstitution. But Fanon also recognized that this linkage required an undoing of the universalizing law that takes the white man as normative, and takes the whole edifice of naturalized racialism as precondition for the simultaneous transubstantiation of black man and his "tethered shadow," the white man (to appropriate a phrase from Bhabha). In contravention of that supposed law, Fanon insists that "The Negro is not. Any more than the white man. ,,9 In the first instance this "intermediate impossible" state of non-existence of the black man is faithful to an Existentialist! humanist credo that "existence precedes essence"--{)r as Sartre himself explained, "man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world-and defines himself afterwards" (Existentialism 28). The black man had to destroy the attributions clustering to him like barnacles, so as to become a man without qualities, utterly naked, before he could become a New Man. But by the same token the myth of the white man as a stable, ontologically independent category had to be destroyed, too. Sartre's existentialist humanism is in fact an explicit departure from a universalist humanism or from essentialist universalism; and he made it clear that "although it is impossible to find in each and every man a universal essence that can be called human nature, there is nevertheless a human universality of condition" (27). Fanon follows Sartre in his problematization of the universalist variety of humanism, but he much more strongly than Sartre questions universalist humanism to expose its unacknowledged or axiomatic Eurocentrism. This interrogation is the substratum of Fanon's ethical antihumanism or posthumanism, encoded in the "final prayer" of BSWM: "0 my body! Make of me always a man who questions" (232). An eminent example of Enlightenment notions of universalism that undergird European humanism is to be found in Immanuel Kant-and Sartre explicitly and radically distinguishes his own humanism from Kant's ideas. If Kant believed that essence preceded existence, Sartre's own existentialism clearly hinged on the premise that existence precedes essence. Hegel was no less a representative of the European and Eurocentric humanism from which Sartre demurred. For Hegel as well as for Kant, non-whites are deficient in rational capacity; the black man in particular is denied full humanity. For both thinkers, it is as if the very skin color of black people condemns them. The axiomatic Eurocentrism of their humanism makes their axiology deeply suspect. In Kant's view, as Emmanuel Eze puts it, "European humanity is the humanity par excellence" (121). What Fanon picks up on in Hegel's work is the apparently deliberate, even willful denial of humanity to people with black skins, and the privileging of white skin above all, at the level of ontology.

Ethical Antihumanism

233

As Kant wrote, "If there is any science man really needs, it is the one I teach, of how to fulfill properly that position in creation which is assigned to man, and from which he is able to learn what one must be in order to be a man" (qtd. in Eze 130). And this ungenerous "humanism," coextensive with Eurocentrism, is Fanon's chief target: he participates in the critique of the "metaphysical belief or Idea (Idee) that European existence is qualitatively superior to other forms of human life" (Serequeberhan qtd. in Eze 142). Fanon has become an unsurpassed exemplar of the project of a global postcolonial critique. One could even say he has become the angel of a postcolonial critique of neocolonialism that has an economic as well as a psychoanalytical dimension. This critique has argued on the one hand that political decolonization has been replaced by the much more variegated and subtly tentacular reach of global finance capital and on the other hand that political decolonization has not meant that the ex-colonized have been successful in shaking off psychic colonization in the form of the continuing hegemony of EuroAmerican ideas, images and apparatuses or institutions of power. It is "probably fair to say," writes Kuan-Hsing Chen, that "the intellectual umbrella under which a global decolonization movement could be initiated began with Marxism" (6). Fanon's contemporary significance is best appreciated in the light of the resurgent interest in a collective and even international intellectual Marxisant critique of globalization and neocolonialism. But it is not as though turning to Fanon is simply an excuse to rally the energies of a flagging Marxism in an age in which history is rumored to have discovered its telos in democratic capitalism. Indeed "Fanon" has become the token of a critique from whose standpoint one can see that "the Marxism of the nineteenth century was never able to rid itself of its eurocentrism" (Chen 7). While historical materialism offered a powerful antidote to idealism and historical capitalism, it also "inherited the evolutionary view of history from the Enlightenment tradition, using the narrative of a universal proposition to cover the entire geographical spaces. lt was precisely in this contradiction that universalism started to crack, beginning to loosen up the confidence of the Universal Subject" (Chen 7). If there has been a renewed interest in Fanon because of the burgeoning of Cultural Studies (conceived as a kind of critical internationalism and as a global decolonization project), then Fanon repays our continued and continually refreshed attention also because his work is an invitation to rethink Eurocentric humanism and its attendant abstract universalism so as to take seriously the racial dimensions of subject constitution, something which the "discourse of modernity" has

SamirDayal

Ethical Antihumanism

not always done adequately. Fanon's exhortation in Wretched ofthe Earth to jettison the Enlightenment model of Europe for a regenerate humanity, says Serequeberhan, "requires that we first recognize and de-structure the speculative metaphysical underpinnings of the Eurocentric constraints that have held us-and still hold us-in bondage. This, in my view, is one of the most important and basic tasks of the contemporary discourse of African philosophy; its critical-negative project-the critique of Eurocentrism" (qtd. in Eze 156-7). My argument is that precisely because he wishes to effect an epistemic break in Eurocentric humanism, Fanon cannot properly resolve the contradictions that arise in his work and cannot bring closure to the "unsatisfied universalism" that he projects into a dimly glimpsed utopic future. 10

final pages of BSWM, where a mutually constitutive dynamic of recognition comes to displace the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave, destroying both master and slave in a refining fire. The question is whether Fanon himself recognizes these complexities. Hall wonders whether, in his disavowal of homosexuality (and the Oedipus complex) in the Antilles, Fanon is not making an overdetermined substitution:

234

235

III. The Affirmation of Fanon's Negative Project: Thinking Fanon's Ethical Antihumanism in the Era of Post-nationalism and Neo-colonialism

I am afraid the Caribbean is the least promising scenario in which to try to prove the absence of the Oedipal drama. With its son-fixated mothers and mother-fixated sons, its complex paternities common to all slave societies of "real" black fathers and "symbolic" white ones, along with its deeply troubled, assertively heterosexual and often homophobic black masculinities, the Caribbean "lives out" the loss of social power by substituting an aggressively phallo-centred "black manhood." The absence of women and the mother in Fanon's text leads one to wonder whether, figuratively, he didn't replace the triadic structure of the Oedipal scenario with the binary coupling of the master/slave trope. (30)

Not everyone, however, finds Fanon's ethical antihumanism a radical departure. Robert Young charges that Fanon merely inverts humanism, this time demonizing the white man (White 125), and as I have observed, Azar points out that if Fanon's dialectic is "a critique of humanism," then it also involves "an emphasis on its necessity" (22). But neither Azar nor Young quite captures the ambivalence of Fanon's ethical antihumanism. Fanon wills the destruction of "black" as well as "white," but his utopian wish to inaugurate an ethics of mutual recognition skews the antihumanist project because it re-epidermalizes black and white (to adapt Hall's reworking ofFanon's term). Hall notes that there are some "who believe that the status of Fanon as a black hero and icon is damaged even by the suggestion that he might have learned anything or-worse--actually been in dialogue with the themes of European philosophy"; as Hall goes on to say, "[t]his kind of essentialism is worse than useless if we are to think seriously about Fanon. It reveals how little such critics understand Fanon's deep implication in French culture and philosophy..." (31). One could argue that Fanon's understanding of colonial race relations can be understood in light of the Hegelian master/ slave dialectic, and many have indeed invoked Hegel. But it is necessary to go beyond this paradigm. It is only after the destruction of the lord and the slave, and not just the unilateral "toleration" or even "recognition" of the latter by the former, that the new Man could emerge in the Utopian future. This future is projected in the

Fanon writes that he "believe[s] that only a psychoanalytical interpretation of the black problem can lay bare the anomalies of affect that are responsible for the structure of [narcissism]. I shall attempt a complete lysis of this morbid body. I believe that the individual should tend to take on the universality inherent in the human condition" (BSWM 10). The call for the "complete lysis" of the "morbid body" stems from the recognition that the symbolic body of the black man has been penetrated, as it were, by a signifier that is foreign to it, and so interferes with a properly symbolic subjectivity. In the Lacanian economy of the Symbolic register, the subject as an effect of symbolization is always constituted by the Other's desire. In a superficial reading, this can be transposed to the situation described by Fanon. But on looking a little closer, difficulties arise, and it is paradoxically in understanding the nature of these difficulties that one can grasp the power of Fanon's conceptualization of an ethical antihumanism, as I am calling it. It is probable that Fanon owed his conceptualization of the binary relation between self and other partly to Sartre, who had written in Being and Nothingness: "I am possessed by the Other. The Other's look fashions my body in its nakedness...By virtue of consciousness the Other is for me simultaneously the one who has stolen my body from me and the one who causes there to be a being which is my being" (Same qtd. in Hall 29). But if one looks at Same more carefully, it turns out that he was really talking about intersubjectivity: "The other is indispensable to my existence, and equally so to any

236

SamirDayal

knowledge I can have of myself....Thus, at once, we find ourselves in a world which is, let us say, that of 'inter-subjectivity'" (Existentialism 45). Fanon's own ideas do not in the final analysis add anything to Sartre's on this one point at least-he does not move beyond intersubjectivity. A critical slippage occurs at the moment when Fanon writes that "the real Other for the white man is and continues to be the black man. And conversely" (BSWM 161). What Fanon's fervent binarism-contra-binarism obscures is the irreducible, non-anthropomorphic big 0 Other: a third term in whose gaze the mutual recognition of self and other must occur. The black man's "morbidity" is a kind ofhystericization: he is stuck in a position in which he is constituted by the other's desire, except that this Other has now been refracted and contracted (in a process of conceptual reduction which may itself no longer be apparent even at the level of orthography) into the white man. So the white man, who rises as the spectralized stand-in for the Other, eclipses the non-anthropomorphic, inhuman gaze of "Other"-who is not just another person, as Lacanian theory makes clear. In other words, the occlusion of the gaze of the Other by the gaze of the white man as exemplary Other has involved a displacing of a psychoanalytic principle (that the subject is always constituted by the Other's desire) by a Eurocentric exceptionalism. In this exceptionalism, the big 0 Other is incarnated in the white man, whose desire now constitutes even the non-white subject while the European or Western "man" is not acknowledged to need or recognize the other to constitute the white man. The gaze of the big 0 Other enforces the triadic structure in which the black and the white subjects must constitute one another. In this way, the big 0 Other both impedes and structures the mutually but asymmetrically constitutive relation of both black and white subjects. Without a recognition of this non-anthropomorphic, inhuman Other, Fanon's whole antihumanist project encounters a fundamental obstacle: his dialectic of mutual recognition of black and white cannot dispense with the poisonous thorn, it even depends on the persistence of "race." To put it differently, Fanon rehearses the simple binarism of race when he writes that "When one has grasped the mechanism described by Lacan, one can have no further doubt that the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man. And conversely," but he fails to theorize with a full understanding of his own insight in the immediately adjacent clause that "Only for the white man The Other is perceived on the level of the body image, absolutely as the not-self-that is, the unidentifiable, the inassimilable" (161). The category of "race" interferes with his nascent recognition of the difference between the (Manichean) other and the big 0

Ethical Antihumanism

237

Other, and so he must yield once more to the Symoblic order at the foundation of the humanist ethics that Fanon endorses the moment in which he calls for the recognition of the black man's humanity. And there's the rub. The Symbolic order in which he is necessarily implicated and inscribed as an ex-colonized subject cannot not be penetrated through and through by Eurocentrism. A crucial aspect of Fanon's project is the articulation of psychic economy with political economy, the reticulation of the struggle for the decolonization of the mind with the struggle for national consciousness. Diana Fuss has noted that Fanon gives us a politics "that does not oppose the psychical but fundamentally presupposes it"; she suggests further that "Fanon fails to register fully the significance of the founding premise of his own theory of colonial relations, which holds that the political is located within the psychical as a powerful shaping force" and that "the psychical functions precisely as a political formation" (Fuss qtd. in Chen 12). My own sense is that ultimately Fanon is much more sensitive to the imbrication of the psychic and the political than Fuss suggests, and furthermore that the psychic is not subordinated to the political. Fanon was ahead of his time because he recognized already that "The West" as represented in the ideologies of racialized universalist humanism was already "everywhere, within the West and outside; in structures and in minds" to borrow Ashis Nandy's memorable phrasing (xi). Fanon's precocious understanding of the West's penetration simultaneously of minds, hearts, economies and societies is an important thread of continuity among BSWM (Peau noire, masques blancs published in 1952), A Dying Colonialism (L 'An V de la revolution algerienne published in 1959), and Toward the African Revolution (Pour la revolution africaine published in 1969), though perhaps nowhere is the connection between the psychic and the political or collective made more powerfully than in The Wretched of the Earth, where, borrowing a page from American history, he writes that the "well-known principle that all men are equal will be illustrated from the moment that the native claims that he is the equal of the settler" (34). The burden on the native is the psychic burden to reconstitute himself as subject "au delil," in the beyond that lies after his deconstruction as black man or "noI quite man" as defined by Western universal humanism. But it is also a reconstitution as subject that has a collective dimension, even a political dimension: "Thus the native discovers that his life, his breath, his bealing heart are the same as those of the settler. He finds out thaI the settler's skin is not of any more value than a native's skin; and it must be said that this discovery shakes the world in a very necessary manner. All the new, revolutionary assurance ofthe native stems from it.,,11

238

SamirDayal

Fanon in no way acquiesces in the subordination of the struggle for psychic decolonization; in no way does he privilege the struggle for national! political self-assertion. The wisdom of articulating the individual and the collective struggles in this sense can only be grasped retrospectively, in a logically as well as historically "postcolonial" moment. This point is made by Altaf Gauhar in observing an irony of decolonization in the case of the masses: "For the masses," he writes, "the achievement of independence [in India] was the end of their struggle and also the end of their dreams...nationalism could not serve either as a cover to conceal economic and social disparities nor hold back the tides of regional autonomous pressures...The seeds of disintegration in the subcontinent were all sown in the colonial period. They are now coming to bitter fruition (Gauhar qtd. in Chen 15). Here Gauhar accurately fingers the crucial truth: that the bathos of independence has to do with the detumescence of the collective vision of phallic self-sufficiency. Gauhar sees clearly that you cannot understand "parochial and class identities" without understanding that phantasmatic or psychic motivations play a large part in driving parochial strife and ethnonationalism or forms of xenophobia between Hindu and Muslims, for instance. Fanon sees this equally clearly, and his emphasis on the psychic in BSWM should not be seen as merely incidental to or competing with the political struggle of nationalism. If we focused solely on nationalism's traces in Fanon's oeuvre (including A Dying Colonialism, for instance) we would entirely miss Fanon's contemporary relevance at the level of his insights into the internal struggle of the black man. Today we see that while nationalism is far from defunct in the excolonial world, it is equally the case that "for the ex-colonized, nationalism is no longer the panacea, once magnified into global capitalism, the hierarchical structure of the nation-state more or less continuing the established order of colonialism with which one could not compete with its forerunners; at this moment, perhaps only by bringing out a 'higher' and 'larger' category, civilization, could seal the unsealable scar" (Chen 18). Fanon in BSWM was attuned precisely to this impossible possibilism ("sealing the unsealable scar"), and he theorized it in a psychoanalytic register. We must also recognize that Fanon's commitment to a traditional nationalist and political activism in Algeria was an attempt in part to identify himself with the virile manhood implied by Algerian nationalist resistance to colonialism. For some contemporary postcolonial theorists, Fanon's compromise embrace of a traditional form of politics was a result of his baving read the writing on the wall: even before he had entered his

Ethical Antihumanism

239

final, fatal illness, he had to have seen how fragile, incomplete and distant remained the grander project of constituting a New Man. But this postcolonial reading needs to be complicated. Nationalism, Neil Lazarus maintains, "has been seen as constituting a kind of return of the repressed. The sheer destructiveness of developments in Rwanda, Liberia, Chechnya, the Caucasus, and [the former] Yugoslavia, has been laken to reveal a fundamental truth about nationalism in general: not merely that it is chauvinistic, but also that it only ever results in the violent intensification of already existing social divisions" (qtd. in Alessandrini 161). In the heady context of historical decolonization, Fanon could believe in the potential of national liberation to "change the order of the world" (Wretched 36). Fanon had embraced a straightforwardly political rhetoric of nationalism in A Dying Colonialism and The Wretched of the Earth, for instance. But again the greater power and the evocative poetry of BSWM (which is not without its own political force) inheres in its imagining of a new psychic formation. And it is precisely in Wretched, perhaps his most resonant reflection on national consciousness, that Fanon makes poses his calculatedly ambivalent challenge to those who rally to the cry of nationalism: "National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension" (Wretched 199; emphases added). Here Fanon is endorsing not a political exclusivism but a consciousness: could there be a clearer declaration of Fanon's goal of articulating the political dimension with the psychic? Yet there is a poetic force to these contradictions, and perhaps that too is a reason why a return to Fanon can be tonic in these times of anxiety about the postcolonial agenda, about the obsolescence of the postcolonial as an analytic. Fanon's passion is an inspiration from which that agenda, that analytic, can draw inspiration, even if not a theoretical program. Some critics have recognized the power of Fanon 's ambivalent challenge quoted above. Maivan Clech Lam, for instance, ponders whether the Marxist critique of "indigenous and ethnic politics" as "regressive nationalism" and the countervailing critique of Marxism as narrowly Eurocentric could not find common cause in Fanon's advocacy of a national consciousness which is not nationalism but without which, as Lam recognizes, "there is no 'international dimension,' only Eurocentrism" (Makdisi, Casarino and Karl, 257). This countervailing critique of Marxism is made by indigenous activists, but also by critics such as Christopher Miller, who argues that Fanon as Marxist nationalitarian "winds up imposing his own idea of nation in places where it may need reappraising...In Fanon's essay on national culture, there is no analysis of what a nation might be, whether it

240

SamirDayal

is the same in reference to Algeria as it is in reference to Guinea, Senegal, or, most notoriously, the Congo (now Zaire)" (48). Miller's main argument is that Fanon's Marxism is expressed as a species of universalism that "leaves no room for local [particular] knowledge" (50) and that also remains within the orbit of the Eurocentrist discourse of modernity. Does Fanon not argue that "the building of a nation is of necessity accompanied by the discovery and encouragement of universal values"? (Wretched 247). Sekyi-Otu and Lazarus are energetic, vehement even, in their refusal to follow Miller in criticizing Fanon for subordinating and deprecating the material (and particularly pre-colonial) particularities of African realities. They both reject Miller's charge that Fanon traffics in essentialism and universalism, although Lazarus is somewhat more nuanced in his representation of Fanon's antihumanism and antiuniversalism. He acknowledges that Fanon underestimates the particularist perspective embodied in the subaltern classes-here he concedes ground to Miller. All things considered, it would be fair to say that it is abstract humanism, in the form of a flexible, global capitalism, that remains the true enemy for Fanonian "national internationalism" (Lazarus qtd. in Alessandrini 163). This anticapitalism lends Fanon's work some of its contemporary relevance, in the wake of colonialism. For the post-colonial period has not necessarily ushered in an era free from new forms neocolonialism and global capitalism. And Fanon's resonantly ambivalent internationalism is validated by what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have called the "rhythm" of the collective revolutions of the twentieth century-ranging from the communist revolutions of 1917 and 1949 to the antifascist movements of the 1930s and 1940s to the liberation struggles of the I960s through to the bringing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This rhythm, note Hardt and Negri, is the "beat of a new aetas, a new maturity and metamorphosis of the times" (394). The force that drives this beat also drives the struggle of the black against the epistemic and psychic violence done to him. This is why I would not be quite as quick as Lazarus to reject Bhabha's psychoanalytic recuperation of Fanon by way of an overcompensatory reading of Fanon "from back to front" (88-89), for Fanon commands us to recognize that colonization and neo-colonial forms are at their basis human relations of domination and therefore are also to be read at the level of psychic motivation. This recognition, chez Fanon, is for me is the power center of his oeuvre, which is why I have focused on BSWM, where it is most starkly in evidence. And his yoking of the political with the psychic, without privileging the one over the other, is

Ethical Antihumanism

241

Fanon's way of severing the Gordian knot of the two strands of universalism and particularism. As Sekyi-Otu reminds us, "the possibility of a domestic democratic arrangement and an uncoerced democratic internationalism is at bollom a version of what a proponent of 'the new democratic theory' has described as 'the traditional philosophical problem of particulars and universals. '" If so, asks Sekyi-Otu, is it not possible that the apparent failure of communism and socialism is the result of a "failure to honor in theory and practice a critical insight of the early Marx according to which universals come from the uncoerced gathering of the 'many ones'? 'Democracy,' Marx proclaimed, 'is the generic constitution' precisely because it honors this syntax of universals and particulars" (15). Can we conclude then that Fanon's project to set afoot a new Man really grasped the syntax of the universal and the particular, that he is able to install a copula persuasively linking a theory of the (black and the white) individual with a theory of the collective, that he is able to articulate the psychic with the political? On this score, Bhabha has been criticized (as a representative of postcolonial criticism) for reading Fanon too generously and even "backwards"-Lazarus echoes this criticism too (Alessandrini 163). 1 think Bhabha is right in responding to his critics by saying that "[c]ertain types of universalism translate as relativism. Marc Latarnie has suggested an unsatisfied universal that keeps one working. It is not a question that something will be resolved. Fanon says that the struggle will take a long time" (Read 163). And Hall, in the same exchange, adds that "1 have not yet fully recovered from the staggering realization that whenever the universal human is invoked, certain people had better duck because it isn't intended for them." Fanon has not resolved the question of the universal: "It remains unresolved each time, and each time he takes a slightly different point" (Read 163). It is a refusal to acquiesce to a premature totalization that motivates Fanon. Ifhe was critical of Western humanism, he was also wary of extant universalism while at the same time he envisaged a future in which a more expansive and developed universalism could be imagined. The refusal of totalization is one of the aspects of Fanon's work that keeps the work compelling or provocative and repays return to it. For the refusal is also an obedience of the ethical imperative to resist Eurocentrism and Eurocentric humanism, something Arif Dirlik acknowledges as "an obvious necessity" precisely "at the very moment of its victory globally" (I). Dirlik is critical of postcolonialism's tendency to collude with capitalist power structures. For him, speaking of "Europe and its others" is already to commit a solecism, because the "[l]egacies of EuroArnerica are everywhere"-and

242

SamirDayal

he notes that Fanon "in an earlier day" locates these legacies in the psyches of the non-European other. Fanon's question is whether these legacies can be challenged from within, on the level of ontology. I argue in this essay that Fanon sees ontology as inadequate. unripe. when it partakes of a racial binarism that undergirds the Eurocentric conception of modernity. This is why Fanon insists that "Ontology-once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside-
Ethical Antihumanism

243

is properly speaking isomorphic with the humanity of the human as such" (qtd. in Eze 130). Just as the notion of universalism for Fanon remains "unsatisfied," so also, for him, the ontological retains a provisional logical priority over second-order culturalisms such as gender. For contemporary readers, the question here is whether one can legitimately say that ontology logically precedes gender as well as race. Is a man a man before he is a black man? Fanon seems to have wanted to argue as much, and his target was the egregious notion that having a black skin marked one as inferior, even less than human. Fanon is engaged in the grand experiment of creating what Robert Bernasconi, with measured understatement, terms "new concepts" (Eze 191). As readers we should not do Fanon the disservice then of reading a premature fixity of identity back into the work where it seems to offer neither a comprehensive and universalized "new black man" nor a carefully gender-differentiated range of black selves, male and female. Nor can we tum our gaze away from the fact that the new Man he projects would be again a subject of language, but of a language rearticulated. And the symbols of that new Man would crystallize out of the field of the Other, to put it in terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis-symbols that remain as yet mere runes that attend upon the ruins of the deconstructed black subject-and the white subject. Did this revolutionary project really fail? It is certainly a tragic irony that Fanon died without seeing any real evidence that his project had succeeded. The Fall of 1961 was the last season of Fanon's short and brilliant life; he died one year before the liberation of Algeria-in the cause of which he had spent the last five years of his life (between 1956 and 1961). But there was another great irony in his death. Not only did he die in what he himself called "the nation of lynchers," namely the U.S. (Geismar 178), but in his own mind, a major philosophical quest would come full circle for him there--but in the cruelest of inversions. He had to come to America as a last resort, to treat his terminal leukemia, so as to buy time to accomplish a little more of his life's work. That life's work included above all the project of deconstructing the terminal conflict between black man and white man, a project which, as I argue, he inaugurated in his first book, Black Skin. White Masks. But it was only when Fanon was at the very end of his life, in a delirium that was the mocking shadow of the "manicheism delirium" he had railed against in BSWM, that his project found its ironic consummation. In this terminal delirium, he imagined that the spate of blood transfusions he was being given as a treatment for his leukemia were a conspiracy to make him white: "They put me in the washing machine again last night" (Geismar

244

Ethical Antihumanism

SamirDayal

186). Never was the destruction of the black man so traumatically "realized" for him than in this terrifying repetition ("with-a-difference") of his dream. But his project to bring a new Man into being never really came to fruition, any more than Marx's ever came to fruition, and my essay has explored some ofthe reasons why it could not succeed. We may well ask, what might be gained from the completion of the Fanonian project, if such a completion is possible?12 Beyond the truism that Fanon's project represents an optimism of the will if a pessimism of the intellect, one can say that the real contribution of this project would be a fusion of the ethics of psychoanalysis with the ethics of "the political." The value of Fanon's project lies in the observance of the friability of subjectivity, and the imperative to imagine possible alternative subjectivities. And it is in the Fanonian project's commutation between the often highly individuated scope of psychoanalysis and its collective energeia, its communitarian or social impulses and political commitments that its true power shines forth. For me, this is the force of Fanon's preference for the incomplete lived experience (the experience of psychic be-ing) over a rationalistic knowledge (which grasps self-reflexively the meaning of the experience). Not for nothing was the fifth chapter of BSWM originally entitled "L 'experience vecue du Nair." Fanon's opposition of lived experience and knowledge almost exactly maps the Lacanian vel-which posits an unbridgeable divide between being and meaning. Fanon writes, "a consciousness committed to experience is ignorant, has to be ignorant, of the essences and the determinations of its being" (B WSM 134). Fanon embraces this specific incompleteness: "I needed to lose myself completely in negritude ... I needed not to know...at the very moment when I was trying to seize my own being, Sartre, who remained The Other, gave me a name and thus shattered all illusion" (136137). Here he distances himself from Sartre's thesis that negritude is only a "minor" term in a dialectical progression towards a race-less society, as though such a society was within conceptual grasp (Kruks 131). Fanon demurs, wisely recognizing that the impulse towards community, the imperative of "the political" cannot be engaged in terms of slogans but must be articulated with the much less certain territory-the occult zone, to borrow from Fanon himself-of psychic life. Fanon certainly does not commit himself to "negritude" (and so he is quite different from a Leopold Senghor or an Aime Cesaire) as though blackness were a reification or as though an "authentic" black self were already there, waiting to be inhabited. Rather than celebrating authentic blackness Fanon fully recognizes the divided and processual "nature" of the black subject, and embraces it as

245

already a ruin, deconstructing itself with every iteration. This is what facilitates the expression of a paradoxical ethical antihumanism as a form of freedom that emerges from Fanon's astute understanding of "the political." Sartre had declared in Existentialism and Humanism that the only kind of humanism he would be willing to entertain would begin from an understanding of man's imperfectibility: "Man is all the time outside of himself' in this humanism, for "it is in projecting and losing himself beyond himself that he makes man to exist; and, on the other hand, it is by pursuing transcendent aims that he himself is able to exist" (55). Even this existentialist humanism is too sanguine a view if we consider the pressure of the historical-the political condition under colonialism-that Fanon's subject inhabits. The black subject, and the black body, are not already hypostatized in the service of a political agenda but are questions that cannot yet be answered because there is no language in which they can take shape. They are open to the future. The black man remains a possible figment of what Sartre described as the "necromantic attempt to induce being in and by the vibratory disappearance of the word" (Black Orpheus 25). This too is a meaning of Fanon's closing prayer in BSWM: "0 my body, make of me always a man who questions" (232).

Notes In that text he explicitly writes that the "solution" he is after is "a restructuring of the world" (82). 2Verges 259; also, see Azar 23-24. 3 See Hall's discussion, especially p.18. 4 Political violence is ultimately in the service of an epistemological violence construed in a reversal of Gayatri Spivak's sense of epistemological violence: here violence is envisaged as a kind of purgatorial fire-violence done to epistemological ossifications, invidious categories of being, such as black and white, black vs. white. This violence would bum away the carapace of whiteness which Sartre saw as a privilege the white man has enjoyed for three thousand years but which now was threatened: the "black men have fixed their gaze upon us and our own gaze is thrown back in our eyes" ("Introduction," Wretched21). , In Being and Nothingness Sartre had written of the power of the "Other" to transform the "I" into an object, even to make the "I" an agent of his own selfobjectification, and had also anticipated the reciprocal dimension of objectification that Fanon echoes-the "Other" is also constituted in this objectifying system (Being and Nothingness, Part Three). Just as the status of the Jew is exceptional in Sartre's thought, because the Jew is situationally fixed-he cannot not occupy the I

246

SamirDayal

Ethical Antihumanism

247

Works Cited position of the Jew (Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew), the black man is "held to authenticity...he accepts the word 'Negro' which is hurled at him as an epithet, and revendicates himself, in pride as black in the face of white" (15; emphasis added). 6 Bhabha reminds us that the "fantasy of the native is precisely to occupy the master's place while keeping his place in the slave's avenging anger. 'Black skins, white masks' is not, for example, a neat division; it is a doubling, dissembling , image of being in at least two places at once which makes it impossible for the devalued, insatiable evolue (an abandonment neurotic, Fanon claims) to accept the colonizer's invitation to identity: 'You're a doctor, a writer, a student, you're different, you're one of us.' It is precisely in that ambivalent use of'different'-to be different from those that are different makes you the same-that the Unconscious speaks of the form of Otherness, the tethered shadow of deferral and displacement. It is not the Colonialist Self or the Colonized Other, but the disturbing distance in between that constitutes the figure of colonial othernessthe White man's artifice inscribed on the Black man's body. It is in relation to this impossible object that emerges the liminal problem of colonial identity and its vicissitudes" (117). I would demur from Bhabha's assertion that to be different from those that are different makes you the same. The logic of this differentiation is somewhat different and importantly so-to be different in this connection from those who are different makes you simply someone who can be marked with a different difference. The history of colonialism provides substantial evidence of the effective emotional logic of "toleration" and limited acceptance-for some people will always be less different than others. The thought is that "You can join the club in an inferior capacity, you can rub shoulders with some of us, but you can never be allowed to be a guest in our homes, marry our women, become truly one of us." 7 See Part JJI, Being and Nothingness. 8 Of course, the Sartrean Other is not the same as the Lacanian big a Other, who has no Other (Lacan writes that there is no Other of the Other). See, Sartre, AntiSemite and Jew. 9 Fanon,

qtd. Bhabha, "Foreword" to BSWM ix; italics original. In a longer version of this paper I analyze Fanon's "blind spots" and explain the reasons for Fanon's inability to work out the contradictions that arise in his work, one of them being his treatment of the female colonized body and the black woman writer/intellectual. 11 Les Damnes de la Terre ctd. Azar 27; emphasis added. 12 I thank the readers of boundary 2 for insisting on this question. 10

Alessandrini, Anthony. ed. Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Azar, Michael. "In the Name of Algeria: Frantz Fanon and the Algerian Revolution." Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives. Ed. Anthony Alessandrini. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.21-33. Bernasconi, Robert. "African Philosophy's Challenge to Continental Philosophy." Postcolonial African Philosophy. Ed. Emmanuel Eze, London: Blackwell, 1997.J 83-196. Bhabha, Homi. "Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition." Foreword to Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press, 1986. Rpt. in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Chen, Kuan-Hsing, ed. Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1998. Doane, Mary Ann. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1991. Dirlik, Arif. "Is There History after Eurocentrism? Globalism, Postcolonialism, and the Disavowal of History." Cultural Critique 42 (Spring 1999): 1-34. Eze, Emmanuel Chuckwudi. ed. Postcolonial African Philosophy. London: Blackwell, 1997. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. C.L. Markham. With an Introduction by Homi Bhabha. New York: Grove, 1991; London: Pluto 1986. _. A Dying Colonialism. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove, 1967. _. The Wretched of the Earth. Preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, Paris: Franyois Maspero. Trans. C. Farrington. New York: Grove, 1991. _. Toward the African Revolution. Trans. H. Chevalier. New York: Grove, 1988. Fuss, Diana. Identification Papers. New York: Routledge, 1995. Geismar, Peter. Frantz Fanon. New York: Dial Press, 1971. Gordon, Lewis, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Renee T. White, eds. Fanon: A Critical Reader. London: Blackwell, 1999. Hall, Stuart. "The After-Life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?" The Fact ofBlackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation. Ed. Alan Read. Institute of Contemporary Arts, Seattle: Bay Press, 1996. 14-37.

248

SamirDayal

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2000. Hegel, G.W.F. Philosophy of Right. Trans. S.W. Dyde. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1996. Kruks, Sonia. "Fanon, Sartre, and Identity Politics." Fanon: A Critical Reader 122- 133. Eds. Lewis Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting ' and Renee T. White. London: Blackwell, 1999. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsycho-Analysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton, 1977. Urn, Maiviin Clech. "A Resistance Role for Marxism in the Belly of the Beast." Marxism beyond Marxism. Eds Makdisi, et al. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.255-264. Lazarus, Neil. "Disavowing Decolonization: Fanon, Nationalism, and the Question of Representation in Postcolonial Theory." Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives. Ed. Anthony Alessandrini. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. 161-194. Makdisi, Saree, Cesare Casarino and Rebecca E. Karl, eds. Marxism beyond Marxism. New York and London, Routledge 1996. Marx, Karl. Capital. Unabridged. Vol I: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. Ed. Frederick Engels. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. New York: International Publishers, 1975 [1867]. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1978 [1852]. Mhembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Humanism and Terror. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1980. -. The Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974. Miller, Christopher. Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Mohanram, Radhika. Black Body: Women, Colonialism, and Space. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1983. Read, Alan, ed. The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation. Institute of Contemporary Arts, Seattle: Bay Press, 1996. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Anti-Semite and Jew. Trans. S.W. Allen. Paris: Presence Africaine, 1976.

Ethical Antihumanism

249

_. Black Orpheus. Trans. S.W. Allen. Paris: Presence Africaine, 1976. _. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Trans. with an Introduction by H. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1993. _. Existentialism and Humanism. Trans. with an Introduction by Philip Mairet. New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1977 [1946]. _. Notebooks for an Ethics. Trans. David Pellauer. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992 [1983]. _. Preface. Wretched of the Earth. Trans. C. Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1968. Sekyi-Otu, Ato. Fanon's Dialectic of Experience. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. Serequeberhan, Tsenay. "The Critique of Eurocentrism and the Practice of African Philosophy." Postcolonial African Philosophy. Ed. Emmanuel Eze, London: Blackwell, 1997.)41-161. Verges, Franyoise. Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Metissage. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999. Young, Robert. White Mythologies: Writing, History and the West. New York & London: Routledge, 1991.

Towards A Post-Western Humanism Made to the Measure of Those Recently Recognized as Human

CHAPTER TEN TOWARDS A POST-WESTERN HUMANISM MADE TO THE MEASURE OF THOSE RECENTLY RECOGNIZED AS HUMAN JOAN ANIM-ADDO

This paper, in taking up the invitation to rethink humanism, seeks to articulate a reconfiguration of human relations through the thought of "the radical other," itself a crucial signifier (perhaps firstly through its absence from philosophical discourse) of the problematic of various humanism(s). In effect, while borrowing and reinterpreting Jacques Derrida's conceptualization of the "pathway(s) from which we have hardly emerged-perhaps" (124), I propose to engage dialogically with Caribbean theorist and novelist, Sylvia Wynter whose extensive discussion of humanism' and minority discourse allows an important starting point for an examination of the challenge to humanism posed by the new human. Used in this sense, the epithet "new" implies a measure of irony on the basis of inferred legal recognition, as such, only in the nineteenth century with the abolition of Atlantic slavery, and contextualized here within "the play of a certain proximity" (124) that less than two hundred years of such recognition allows. Edward Said's concern with reinterpretation of "the Western cultural archive" (59) particularly in relation to exiled and displaced peoples highly pertinent to this discussion is addressed initially through the eighteenthcentury writing of the black activist Olaudah Equiano, who, kidnapped and sold into Atlantic slavery, nonetheless published his remarkable The Interesting Narrative ofthe Life ofOlaudah Equiano. or Gustavus Vassa, the African in 1789, five years after Immanuel Kant's Enlightenment essay.2 In relation to Equiano's narrative, I hope to highlight a crucial flaw of Enlightenment humanism, namely its inability (or reluctance) in theorizing the "black," to universally recognize the human.] Perhaps by extension of this logic, the "black" may be said to have been placed firmly

251

within the realm of obedience rather than that of reason. Nor can it be surprising that such erroneous thinking has detracted from a whole scale appreciation of Enlightenment thought. Dipesh Chakrabarty notes, for example, the "struggle" of African-Caribbean Fanon "to hold on to the Enlightenment idea of the human" in view of European imperialism's reduction of the "idea of the human" to "the figure of the settler-colonial white man" (5). Despite precious little attention to this aspect of humanist discourse, certainly some antipathies remain. Wynter starkly articulates how this theoretical blind spot, which was absorbed and developed in humanist consciousness as an expression of civilized order, can and does continue to haunt human relations as follows: The struggle of our millennium will be one between the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e. Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioural autonomy of the human species itselfI ourselves. ("Unsettling" 260)

At the same time, Wynter has been clear about that which she refers to as "a second self-assertion" of the human (as opposed to merely the Western bourgeois) that undertakes the task of the "altering of our systems of meanings, and their privileged texts" ("Beyond" 365). An initial encounter with Wynter through her sole novel Hills ofHebron, which was published in London in 1962, reveals a Janus-like author concerned to look to the Caribbean region's traumatic past central to which was systematic misrecognition-Iegitimized by "privileged" humanistic discourse--of the black person, as property rather than as human. Yet, Wynter's novel of post-slavery survival writes both collective memory of this humanistic evil as well as its profound dilemma: a future that turns in some measure upon a particular maternal will contextualized by a heritage representative of the "birthing of property" ("Women" 70) and denigration of the African-heritage "other." As I have argued elsewhere,4 in the notion of a second self-assertion Wynter, the critic, like Wynter the creative writer, may be said to be Janus-faced, concerned to hold both past and future in sight, a positioning that is particularly valuable to the "minority discourse" of interest here. Wynter suggests that in resolving the either/or of the two Janus faces-in Airne Cesaire's terms-a new and post-Western humanism needs to be negotiated, one now made to the measure of the world. At the same time, that world was one which exemplified within its colonial plantations an

252

Joan Anim-Addo

important approximation of global space (or one at least unmistakably formed by unprecedented global movement) already peculiarly contracted given its peoples of differing customs, belief systems, languages and ethnicities. The humanism of the period, with its flawed perception of the human, and despite the influence of its powerful rhetoric, in this respect failed not only through its ethno-bias, as it were, but in so doing, denied itself the opportunity of a more global reading of plantation realities, , whether or not those global dynamics may be viewed as liberating. Centered in Europe and limited by a vision of the world constrained by that center, euro-centered rhetoricians "overrepresented" Europe, to borrow from Wynter. From the resulting fabrication came the "hyperreal Europe" of which Chakrabarty writes (45). Thus, an important outcome was the production and dissemination of influential texts reproducing the "overrepresentation" that Wynter elaborates upon, and with it "a Manichean logic of inclusion and exclusion" (Nethersole 644) in which, as Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze highlights, below, a remarkable inter-textuality was nonetheless demonstrated. Perhaps Eze's work begins to approach Chakrabarty's "politics of despair" (Chakrabarty 45) in its particularized presentation of the "modem as inevitably contested" (45). Fortunately for a more contemporary era that might contemplate a post-western humanism now made to the measure of the world, in the intervening years, globalization, the seeds of which might have been discerned on colonial plantations, has also spawned a variety of minority discourses. South African comparativist, Reingard Nethersole writes, for example, of "the formerly colonized" who "insert themselves into the discourse of the center after the center disseminated its modes of literary and theoretical knowledge in the colonies by way of the institutional transference of education and publishing" (640). This outcome also resonates in Chakrabarty's apt point that the European colonizer "preached this Enlightenment humanism at the colonized" even as he "denied it in practice" (4). Not wishing to underestimate the process of insertion "into the discourse," and ever mindful that most of the "formerly colonized" do not achieve a position at the "centre," particularly, for example, Africanheritage females, I would propose here as a challenge to the negotiating of "a new and post-Western humanism" discussed at some length with Wynter, the permeation of some existing borders of knowledge through the reading of "minority discourse" such as that sensitized by experience of slavery and post-slavery meanings not always located at the center. In the twenty-first century, African-Caribbean literature, in many respects the litmus paper of post-slavery, post-colonial meanings, is with rare

Towards A post-Western Humanism Made to the Measure of Those Recently Recognized as Human

253

exceptions a little-known corpus of "permeable boundaries" which draws upon a culture "in relation" (64), to cite Glissant, from the outset, and might best serve this project described by Wynter as "imperatively necessary" ("Disenchanting" 234). An interrogative function indicated by Wynter is foregrounded as follows: In order to call in question this ontologically subordinated function, "minority discourse" can not be merely another voice in the present ongoing conversation or order of discourse generated from our present episteme ...Rather, it should bring closure to a conversation which is now as conceptually and imaginatively exhausted in our post atomic, postbiotechnological order of reality. (231) If the notion of "closure" seems either premature or unlikely, it may be productive to insert into the discussion, the prospect of mediation which Nethersole's "theory in and of the gap" suggests; that is to say, "theory that grounds itself in the groundlessness of that gap...both connective and disruptive" and "urgent" (646). Mindful of the "connective and disruptive," two particular historical moments are of concern to this discussion: firstly, the decades of British anti-slavery action precipitating public voice by, and thus public use of reason for enslaved Africans such as Equiano, and secondly, the decades immediately following the end of the Second World War, or postWindrush years in Britain ushering a new, extended, if imperceptible, wave of published narrative representing the black self defying "untranslatability." Wynter's published! public voice was among the few African-heritage creative voices to be heard at that time in Britain of the 1960s. Through the latter era, I shall attempt to map a major period of reappraisal-but also of crisis--of the human that has been insufficiently examined, a "tum" significant to the acceptance of the "black" as human. Wynter's emphasis upon the necessity of the presence of minority discourse allows the disjunctions evident in such a "tum" to be rendered visible and to serve as critique or deconstruction of a powerful will to amnesia. She states: The major proposal here is that it is only as a leading thrust in this new movement of "counter-exertion" that Minority Discourse is imperatively necessary, because [it is] linked to the motives of general human selfinterest, rather than to the particular interests of specific groups ("Disenchanting" 234).

254

Joan Anim-Addo

It is in order to critically interrogate humanism, then, in terms of a more "general human self-interest" that I shall treat specifically the question of what it is to be human on the edge of recognition and how this is represented particularly within African-Caribbean literary practice in Britain, since this little known literature seldom examined in the context of humanism, is unusually privileged in this enquiry in an attempt to gain some fresh insight. Additionally, in the light of paradoxical perspectives " from those formerly excluded as not human, though acutely observant of the duplicitous conditions and rhetoric of humanism, I propose to develop, in line with Wynter, signposts to a post-Western humanism made to the measure of recently recognized humans insistently communicating an urgent, shared sense of humanity. At the same time, concern focuses on the dynamics of contemporary globalization driven by Western technology and capital but also "the post-West" phenomenon in terms of "impact on the rest of the world" including homogenization but also some exposure to the impetus of differentiation.

I. The "pathway(s) from which we have hardly emergedperhaps" Already indicated, above, the "pathway" of specific concern to this discussion is that of Atlantic slavery which by the eighteenth century, it might be argued, signified a particular early model of globalization the scale of which was unprecedented. In the process, inequality on the basis of race became institutionalized across the globe. Fuelled by technological advances in shipping and armaments, the development of European trade with Africa enabled the forced transportation of Africans from areas today known as Nigeria, Ghana, Mali, Sierra Leone and notably, much of the coastal areas of Africa. By this means, outside of Africa, Africans soon peopled areas of Europe as well as North and South America and the Caribbean region. 5 Large numbers of Scots and Irish, Spanish, Dutch, Danes, French, Portuguese and English crossed the Atlantic to settle or colonize much of the Americas, as well as sections of Africa. Travel, trade and technology in the interest of profit transformed the world. Against this backdrop of diverse global movement, European powers challenged each other militarily and fought out their battles not only in European waters but also in the Caribbean region where "new" land became the spoils of war and treaties gave rise to incentives for Europeans to re-settle in the newly discovered regions. Within this era characterized by mercantilism and the profit motive, humanist thought sought to develop notions of civilization and its relation to property, most importantly, at a

Towards A Post-Westem Humanism Made to the Measure of Those Recently Recognized as Human

255

point in time when the buying and selling of black humans as property was 6 enshrined in much European and American law. As close examination of Enlightenment thought reveals, this "pathway" is also one which legitimized gross inequality particularly in its treatment of race on behalf of, in Wynter's terms, the dominant "ethnoclass" acutely over representing itself "as if it were the human itself' (260). That inequality was the order of the day is a significant consideration since, as I hope to illustrate, our "pathway," Atlantic slavery, illustrates with some accuracy the trajectory of racial inequality that, legitimized in intellectual thought, and reflected in religious, social, legal, and financial practices, temporarily silenced but could not stifle those humans omitted from its discourse. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze's Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (1997) foregrounds the "Enlightenment discourse on race" in the writing of eminent philosophers including Hurne, Kant and Hegel. Perhaps emblematic of such thought is Carl von Linne's The System of Nature (1735), higWighted by Eze as first of many texts to foreground the "underlying hierarchical order" (10) reiterated by scholarly authority of the day through which black people were dismissed as less than human.' In exploring how such an underlying assumption running through much eighteenth-century intellectual thought and the consciousness of the age legitimized inequality, I am also concerned to illustrate how this s thought impacted upon a counter-discourse culminating in Wynter's call. Eze's collection of important extracts from the writing of key European philosophers also signifies views contextualizing Equiano'sera, for each of these influential men wrote about race and each was authoritative in his own way about black people's place in the exclusive order they envisaged. At the same time, as Eze demonstrates, there is considerable intertextuality or cross-referencing between the range of philosophers including the influential Kant and the well known British (or more precisely, Scottish) philosopher, David Hume. Kant, writing about the origin of human races, states about "Negroes": The extreme damp heat of the warm climate must show.... The skin must be oily, not only to moderate the influence of evaporation but also to prevent the injurious absorption of the noxious vapors of the air. The superabundance of the iron particles, which are present in all human blood, and which are precipitated in the reticular substance... (which make all Negroes stink) cause the blackness that shines through the superficial skin...Besides all this, damp heat promotes strong growth in animals in general; in short, the Negro is produced, well suited to his climate: that is,

256

Joan Anim-Addo strong, fleshy, supple, but in the midst of the bountiful provision of his motherland lazy, soft and dawdling. (Kant qtd. in Eze, 46; my emphasis)

In similar vein, Hume, reflecting on the subject, "Of National Characters" writes:

Towards A Post-Western Humanism Made to the Measure of Those Recently Recognized as Human

257

In foregrounding how African-Caribbean women were constructed as a distinct and silent group without Reason and consequently "having nothing worthwhile to say," I mean also to highlight the impact this would have had and continues to have upon their reception as writers claiming the authority of the published word as, for example, Sylvia Wynter did in 10

And indeed there is some reason to think, that all the nations, which live beyond the polar circles or between the tropics, are inferior to the rest of the species, and are incapable of all the higher attainments of the human mind .... Jam apt to suspect the negroes and in general all other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences.... Not to mention our colonies, there are negroe slaves dispersed all over Europe, of whom none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity.... In Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly. (Eze 33; my emphasis)9

II. The Thought of the "Radical Other" While the period represented by Kant and Hume referred to itself as the "Age of Reason," writing by black men privileged and resourceful enough to have gained access to publication argued against the meanings of an age realized in so many forms of injustice against black people. Moreover, for black unrecognized humanity, a central paradox existed since, crucially, a correlate of the "Age of Reason" was the period of British predominance within Atlantic slavery, or, as I have written in Touching the Body: History, Language and African-Caribbean Women's Writing (2007): Atlantic slavery and its coaxial, Enlightenment, represented different cultural frames for the same historical era constructing African-heritage people, specifically women, as silent. This was not as an ideal of femininity but as having nothing worthwhile or of reason to voice. The very silence presented and indicated as proof of lack of mind, informed the culture which would receive African-Caribbean women's literary writing in the twentieth century. While by virtue of patronage, African/Caribbean men negotiated a crack through this impasse, as did African-American Phillis Wheatley, African-Caribbean women remained without published voice. (80-1)

1962. During the same historical moment, then, and despite Equiano' s negotiation of the "crack" or fissure which allowed him both to purchase his freedom and to gain patronage and fmancial resources enough to achieve publication (for he paid for his publication himself), by the fifth edition of his Narrative, in the year 1792, he was constrained to offer his writing to "the friends of humanity" (5) in the name of justice or at least in the hope of influencing the redressing of justice, in the "the cause of humanity." Therein lies an indication of the limitations of humanitarian practice in its meeting of-if not reaching towards--difference. Thus, Equiano's speaking out already incorporates a limited reception since the many hurdles cleared to ensure publication nonetheless lead him to "friends" constrained by exclusionary practice. Eze writes: It can be argued, in fact, that the Enlightenment's declaration of itself as

"the Age of Reason" was predicated upon precisely the assumption that reason could historically only come to maturity in modern Europe, while the inhabitants of outside Europe, who were considered to be of nonEuropean racial and cultural origins, were consistently described and theorized as rationally inferior and savage. (4) In foregrounding views by Hume and Kant that help us to contextualize Equiano's writing, I hope to show the knowledge of self against and within which he was writing. In line with this racialized system of knowledge within the boundaries of reason and the law representing the enslaved as less than human and outside of the law, the authoritative writing of historians such as Edward Long whose The History ofJamaica was published in 1774, alongside Kant and Hume, already "spoke for" black people. A result was a popularized and inter-connected theory or set of hypotheses, which presented black people such as Equiano as, at best, rescued from a primitive state. That Equiano was aware of these dominant views is nowhere more clearly expressed than in his reference to "orangutang philosophers," an extreme expression of eighteenth century thought devoted to proving a link between "orang-utangs" and "negroes.,,11 Long's racist writing attempted to illustrate this when he wrote, "The Negroe race (consisting of varieties) will then appear rising progressively in the scale

258

Joan Anim-Addo

of intellect, the further they mount above the oran-utang and brute creation" (371). Such an assumption of lack ofintellect is significant since its argument firstly precludes intellectual activity among the offspring of African slaves including, of course, that of reason and thought giving rise to the creation of written texts. Secondly, Long's argument is offered with a pseudoscientific rationale attractive to those interested to preserve the racial hierarchies institutionalized by Europeans in the Caribbean. This argument resurfaces, variously modified, in Eurocentric literature well into the twentieth century. In these circumstances, it is perhaps of little surprise that AfricanCaribbean women's voices were not publicly heard until the period of formal reforms when parliamentarians sought to ameliorate the conditions of slavery for women on the basis not only of their productive capacity as laborers but specifically in relation to their reproductive capacity vis a vis the plantation labor force. It was in this period that Mary Prince was published. Yet, as Wynter argues concerning more recent times, "as the category of minority includes the sub-category 'women,' then we are here confronted with the anomaly that it is we who constitute the numerical majority" (234). If like Equiano, Prince seemed primarily concerned with presenting herself as a converted Christian who had experienced the horrors of slavery first hand, this underscores at least a wariness if not a rejection of western humanism which did not acknowledge black humanity. In addition, Prince's standpoint emphasizes a preference for a different system of knowledge in which, if not the human, then at least a responsive deity is believed to be capable of justice. At the same time, and writing against the dominant views of the period, Prince's presentation of self, like Equiano's challenged the construct of the savage or primitive. Yet, in each case, the writing may be seen as disobedient, resistant and a crucial struggle articulating a humanity denied or at least unrecognized. In this respect, such writing reminds us of the relative recency (less than 200 years) of global recognition of black people as humans. Mary Prince's slave narrative and its unequivocal demand for her personal liberty held up not only the mercantile system to interrogation, but the prevailing system of humanity which normalized the routine beating and physical abuse of black children as well as adults. Prince states: "Oh the Buckra people who keep slaves think that people are like cattle, without natural affection. But my heart tells me it is far otherwise" (18). As she catalogues the abuse suffered as "cattle," Prince challenges prevailing mores which assumed cattle status for her. Tellingly, she writes

Towards A Post-Western Humanism Made to the Measure of Those Recently Recognized as Human

259

of sleeping "in a long shed...like the stalls used for cattle" (19). Moreover, Prince offers another system of knowledge based on her lived experience; "I have been a slave myself-I know what slaves feel" (38), she relates to her amanuensis, since her enslaved existence precluded a facility with writing. Slaves were, of course, usually forbidden the practice of formal learning, including reading and writing. 12 At the same time, Prince's ontological impetus as one who "know(s) what slaves feel" is such that, as 1 argue in Touching the Body, she negotiates her way increasingly further away from the inevitability of plantation existence until, in England, she 13 succeeds in getting her story written down and published. In this way, Prince's strategies-and she considered herself "not a stranger to book learning" (2)-served to undermine and interrogate the phallologocentric practices of the Enlightenment discourses. So successful was Prince in challenging the normative and abusive practices of the Atlantic slave system, that her master and mistress sued the Anti-Slavery Society following the appearance of the book. As Helena Woodward highlights, they blamed Prince's "tart tongue" for the furor that followed publication (69). At the same time, Prince, given her slave status, was not allowed to give evidence in the English court hearing the case. The circumstances of Prince's publication are significant because not only was its timing crucial but the publication became critical to a network of anti-slavery women whose activism gradually came to rely on petitioning and personal testimony as key to challenging phallologocentric exclusions or restrictions of their direct involvement in the pressing question of a revision of Enlightenment perceptions of the enslaved, particularly women. These strategies would later serve the women's suffrage movement. 14

III. Minority Discourse at the Borders of Post-humanism That Kant and "enlightened" humanists who propounded similar views on issues of race matter in the twenty-fust century is important precisely because of the profound global impact of their Eurocentric ideas, for the fertile marriage of "philosophy" and "science" would lend vital credence to areas of "knowledge" intent upon proving black people of inferior intellect. Most perniciously, these ideas would also constitute a type of cannibalized curriculum served up to those-including black people-in search of knowledge. ls How such ideas resurface in the everyday context of diasporic peoples claiming a public voice in the global West is no more starkly understood than in an account given by the black16 British playwright, Kwame Kwei-Armah at a recent London conference. Kwei-

260

tl

e c 11 s f

1

r

Joan Anim-Addo

Armah, whose triptych of plays was staged at the National Theatre between 2003-07, exceeded this rare honor for black British writing when one of the plays, Elmina's Kitchen, moved to the Garrick theatre in London's prestigious West End. That this success proved to be too challenging for some of the population manifested itself in the hate mail that followed, a series of which included drawings attempting to show Kwei-Arrnah as a primate. It is not overstating the case to suggest that this is the culturally life-threatening legacy left by race philosophy when London, home to black people for over five hundred years, still produces this crude expression of the belief in racial superiority. Given this context, there should be no pretence about the on-going difficult conditions of cultural production for black people, specifically, African-heritage people living in Britain since at least the sixteenth century. For this group, book publication, which involved a particular zeal and considerable patronage in the eighteenth century, remains a challenge over 200 years later, as writers attest. Partly related to this, African-Caribbean literary history confirms that much post-slavery writing signifies lived experience notably but not exclusively within published autobiography, a genre through which black people in Britain remain largely invisible. Seen against this background, the claiming of a public/published voice was a radical act for a black person in the eighteenth century. It was also a rare and radical act for a woman like Prince, qualifying her doubly as the "radical other" whose silence-breaking began a tradition of African-Caribbean women's writing. Like Equiano's autobiography, Prince's narrative countered the falsehood of prevailing views, undoubtedly no less crude in their expression than those suffered by Kwei-Arrnah, and Prince also challenged those views in important ways. Firstly, her writing told a different and first-person story about black people's lives thus changing what was considered known. Secondly, such writing showed black people to be thinking subjects whose very thoughts belied the dominant view of blacks as incapable of thought. Thirdly, such writing made claims about the author's own humanity-and that of other black people. In proposing a body of literature of "minority discourse" in which Equiano's and Prince's narrative represent significant beginnings, the intention is precisely interrogative since, in one sense, this particular minority discourse foregrounds writing and thought that is always already contested as arising from a group emblematically and historically rejected as suspiciously less capable of thought or enlightened reason. Kwe-Arrnah's twenty-first century testimony underscores this. In this respect, I am not simply proposing, for example, Caribbean literature as a minority discourse. Rather, I would wish to skew my

Towards A Post-Western Humanism Made to the Measure of Those Recently Recognized as Human

261

selection towards texts, like Prince's and Equiano's, that signify also upon globalization and its blurring of boundaries and borders even within the larger body of work the heritage of which is so complex that it is perhaps best understood as "a site of permeable boundaries and multiple identities, offering continuous redefinition of the self and one's relationship to society," (xi) to borrow from Consuelo Lopez Springfield's Daughters of Caliban. Prince, for example, states that she was born in Bermuda. Later, put "on board a sloop" (9), she traveled within the Caribbean region to Turks Island, "going from one butcher to another" (10), until she discovered the power in her own words, a point at which, "at last," she learnt to verbally defend herself, "for I thought it was high time to do so" (13). So, perhaps Prince's persecutors should have been alert to a tongue that refused to be silenced. Thereafter, Prince negotiates herself into the service of Mr. Woods and travels to Antigua (14), thus gaining another step in the chain that leads her to England where she initiates the publication of her story but does not permanently remain resident there. If Prince's narrative raises questions of center and periphery, so does Equiano's differently contested writing, which continues to attract debate concerning its authenticity. 17 Indeed, Equiano's work immediately raised questions about whether he had indeed been born in Nigeria as he stated. Claimed in more recent years by Britain and the US, does Equiano's enslaved period in the Caribbean region, principally Montserrat and St Kitts qualify his writing as Caribbean? What might be understood by Kwei-Arrnah's writing as "Black British" when he claims also both Caribbean and African heritage? Such questions are important to the minority discourse that may best allow the "theory in and of the gap" that Nethersole suggests. In the tradition of Equiano and Prince, the need for powerful redescriptions of certain "selves" is articulated within these texts that also qualify as "narratives of struggle," a term drawn from African-American theorist bell hooks by Thomas Barone that describes the kind of project I am suggesting. Barone, in considering hooks' discussion of such narratives rightly sees these writers as "simultaneously literary and liberatory" (69). Rich in challenging meanings, the writing tells of black subjectivity and the lived experience in a later post-slavery era representative of an intensified global movement. I have discussed more extensively elsewhere that Prince concei ved of her narrative "as one that would protest the black woman's self.,,18 With her autobiographical author(ity) derived from a compulsion to convincingly protest the injustices preventing her from achieving her desire for freedom, Prince's

262

Joan Anim-Addo

autobiographical impetus was not fundamentally celebratory but rather protestatory, a tradition evident in much diasporic discourse. Similarly, the narratives of a later post-Windrush moment would treat the tum of history but also the continuities of that history in Britain. Guyanese born Beryl Gilroy writes: This was a time of moments when we were harried as exotic women, when Brixton had to be kept white, when the Empire, though moribund, was not yet defunct. Our efforts were not only about surviving the stigma of being 'owned' by a part of the European conglomerate, but also about using our imaginations to avoid the pitfalls and pathologies of everyday life. (Leaves 50, my emphasis) While Prince's writing had broken the silence of African-Caribbean women in Britain, the newer writing of the post-Windrush years would indicate a different authority, at times direct while at other times camouflaged or perhaps cross-fertilized by genres in addition to the autobiographical. Gilroy's novel in Praise ofLove and Children (1996) claims both the protestatory and the celebratory impetus of Prince and the later free-born Jamaican, Mary Seacole whose autobiography, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857) records a triumphant narrative of black (or brown) female agency. At the same time, Gilroy's narrating postWindrush protagonist, Melda Hayley, an African-heritage West Indian migrant to London, needs to negotiate the new home-space with not only her brother but also his new wife, the German, Trudi. The encounter between the blue-eyed, blonde-haired figure and the newly professional black woman lies near to the heart of the novel which transforms the global space into homespace primarily from the viewpoint of the black woman so as to offer an important reconfiguration of human relations in a post-slavery era and setting temporally removed from the slave plantation. It is true that these literatures may be readily consumed as already known postcolonial literatures. Alternatively, as minority discourse, they may be read in ways that interrogate humanistic discourse through enquiry that necessitates the inhabiting of the discomfort zone, rather than a ready consumption of the "exotic." By this means, we might allow the possibility of fathoming our relatedness "made inescapable through slavery" as I have discussed elsewhere (Covi, ReSisters 28). Problematic, paradoxical and deeply uncomfortable though such praxis undoubtedly might at times prove to be, its promise in terms of reconfiguring human relations and rethinking the world is indeed valuable. Gilroy's representation of such a moment between Trudi and Melda when their

Towards A post-Western Humanism Made to the Measure of Those Recently Recognized as Human

263

"eyes made four" (In Praise 18), is rich in possible meanings. Yet, such a reconfiguration remains relatively rare since the power of the public word has been largely retained by dominant groupS whose control ensures a continued redefinition of that which is most valuable aesthetically and culturally in our global village life, so as to keep the new human here defined continually on the edge of recognition. The implications for representation of self and others remain significant whether one refers to literary texts or the media. Thus, as prestigious film festivals, book awards and literary events attest, notwithstanding the periodic "letting through" of minority artists-to use Kamau Brathwaite's term (6)--the "gaze" or "look" as cultural articulation of the most powerful elite persists. That such cultural knowledge is shunned, by many, surfaces only in a reading between the lines of statistics concerning empty cinemas and theatres as well incomprehension about a non-reading public in a world of increasing book production. It is possible that the refusal of the representation implicit in such negative statistics also expresses the "other's" concern withWhile cultural survival. Gilroy's rewriting of history interrogates the nature of survival for black people in a London different again from that which Equiano knew, concern about black immigration not dissimilar from Equiano's day serves as an important backdrop to the novel. In the 1760s the Gentleman's Magazine estimated the black presence at 20,000, and the Morning Chronicle suggested 30,000 in Britain, just before the ranks of the poor were so swollen by new black migrants, mainly loyalist AfricanAmerican soldiers, prior to the invitation to Equiano to serve on the Committee concerned with the black poor. Two hundred years later, black authors like Gilroy, writing of "change by immigration as requiring dramatic and external orientation" (J.,eaves 104) were likely to have been only too acutely aware of the hostility with which they were met as new Londoners and children of Empire. In 1968, British MP Enoch powell declared Britain "mad" to "allow the inflow of some 50,000 dependents" of the country's new immigrants into Britain and predicted, calculatedly and to considerable political effect, that by 1988 "the black man will have the whip hand over the white man" (Birmingham Post, April 22, 1968). "Orientation" to such a view and the virulence it attracted is readily evident also in Joan Riley's fiction in which migratory subjects are central. 19 Migrants themselves, both Gilroy and Riley represent in their narratives, those "new" humans or subjects with experience of AfricanCaribbean and metropolitan London existence and its racialized "pathologies of everyday life." Kwei-Arrnah's presentation of such life on stage in the heart of London's theatre-land would surely provoke those

264

Joan Anim-Addo

"pathologies" as succeeding generations of wrItmg by these "new" humans visibly and strongly contest the view of humanistic lack of intellect and, notwithstanding the pre-eminence of such thought, signifY how the most influential and prestigious of western globalize philosophy and science can also be perilously flawed.

III. Imagining a Post-Western Humanism The focus upon specific early writing, above, is not to suggest an-. imperative regarding the inclusion of slave narratives within minority discourse. Yet, they open a fruitful route for meeting the challenge of imagining a post-Western humanism through a simultaneous contextualizing of the problematic past and an underscoring of a crucial source of present friction. Eighteenth and nineteenth century narratives by black authors such as those discussed are direct in their address of humanistic injustices that inform present concerns with the borders of "race." Read as rare testimonies of the lived experience of black people of the period, they also provoke a Derridean deconstruction of contemporary issues of inequality. Specifically, concern lies with the group referred to by Said as "an impressive roster of the newly empowered voices asking for their narratives to be heard" (Culture xx). To contextualize such a "roster" in terms of the Anglophone Caribbean, Said's citation from the nineteenth century British philosopher, John Stuart Mill is thought provoking in its representation of the Anglophone Caribbean or West Indies as follows: These [outlying possessions of ours1 are hardly to be looked upon as countries,... but more properly as outlying agricultural or manufacturing estates belonging to a larger community. Our West Indian colonies, for example, cannot be regarded as countries with a productive capital of their own '" [but are rather1 the place where England finds it convenient to carry on the production of sugar, coffee and a few other tropical commodities. (Mill qtd. in Said 59) In considering what this "production" might mean relative to cultural production and "narratives to be heard" from pressingly urgent "empowered" voices, it is useful to question the degree to which global practices have unsettled the pattern of control and limitation evident in Mill's analysis. Antigua, a crucial stopping-off point for Prince's journey to England, and the island of concern to Said in his discussion of Mansfield Park, may be said to have "produced" the prolific author, Jamaica Kincaid, whose circumstances allowed her an atypical output spanning two decades and more than ten books. Literary critic, Giovanna

Towards A Post-Western Humanism Made to the Measure of Those Recently Recognized as Human

265

Covi writes: "The epistemic perspective Kincaid has been developing in the course of her works seeks in always richer and more complex ways, to offer new parameters for articulating knowledge in our times" (98). But to what extent might metropolitan centers continue to be regulators of the literary cultural production of such "outlying" areas? The story of New Europe's underrepresented black voices remains yet to be written but in the case of England, since cultural production was discouraged inside its territories, West Indian migrant subjects could only authorize their narratives as travelers-migrants or students-to the metropolitan centers. The sole possible publication route for Prince and Wynter is also the traditional means of publication for Anglophone Caribbean authors who by and large must be published in the metropolitan areas or not at all. Three points should be highlighted. In the fust instance, Britain's black diasporic writers, particularly women's voices remain-between decisions of cultural politics and aesthetics-underrepresented. Secondly, in the complex publishing industry, race continues to play its part especially since, in the master's (publishing) house, the cultural gatekeepers remain overwhelmingly monocultural; and thirdly, the situation in English Departments of British universities that might become involved in the reception of the writing, is qualitatively not very different from publishing institutions. These factors bear direct and practical consequences for cultural production of present voices even as one cannot deny the "letting through" from which, for example, authors such as Andrea Levy and Zadie Smith have benefited. 2o Rather, the situation underscores that even within a present that is global and richer in readings and discourses, globalism also facilitates neo-colonial and neo-imperial practices reminiscent of those hegemonic practices of a past critically revealed in Prince's and Equiano's texts. A post-western humanism made to the measure of those recently recognized as humans, namely-in the context of the present discussionthe descendants of enslaved African peoples after the mid-nineteenth century, needs first to acknowledge the horrors of that past which, until the novels of Toni Morrison, for example, were predominantly represented within literary genres by a few white writers, or "through the white eye." More usually, and this is markedly true of the British context, a characteristic silence prevailed. As I have highlighted in relation to the literary history of African-Caribbean women's writing, "the crucial meaning of this for a reading public was that of reinforcing and confirming stereotypes" of silence premised upon lack ofReason (80). Yet, humanity in general is best served by learning the crucial lessons of this collective history particularly since the measure of the present world might usefully

266

Joan Anim-Addo

be gauged by the multiracial complexion of metropolitan cities that signify so many concerns of globalization in crisis. Furthennore, in this context, the practice of speaking for and about black people is one that is strongly contested and urgently needs to be addressed in more contemporary humanist discourse. In Touching the Body I sought to show how misogynistic writing constructed a stereotype of the black woman that emphasized the woman as body without mind who might consequently be designated to specifically narrow, social roles replete with issues of privilege and power. For African-Caribbean women, exclusionary practice extended to the published word, particularly publication of the novel, so that Wynter, representative of the "new" human, was among the first to claim such public authority in the 1960s. In Equiano's time, as in Prince's, such fictive or erroneous construction of the black unenlightened could nonetheless take for granted a particular voicelessness implicit in black people's captive existence whether or not the black person was enslaved. Yet, Gilroy, for example, imagines and represents a world in which black women and men might co-exist equally alongside their white contemporaries despite the gross injustices of the past. Wynter, Gilroy's contemporary, in signaling the need for a postwestern humanism indicates an urgency underscoring a vision that should not be thought of as mere abstraction. Nethersole's discussion, too, similarly resonates with an urgency that is readily understood in r~lation to issues of globalization. Furthennore, Nethersole testifies to that which might be considered a post-western condition. She states: Western culture managed to conceal the forms of standardization under the name of the universal for the purpose of domination rather well until challenged by other cultural traditions, institutions, and practices in a globally condensed world. (644) Although the "challenges" that periodically erupt-most recently framed in the discourse of terrorism-are often considered as symptomatic of lack of enlightenment, they may usefully be read as signs of a postwestern condition. In addition, if Nethersole's argument concerning the penneability of boundaries holds, it is in the erosion of West/non-West boundaries increasingly reflected in the demography of metropolitan city life that the post-Western condition may be seen. Thus the challenges take place increasingly in our Western cities as they become inescapably multicultural, multiethnic, more black and diasporic. In other words, the rebellious acts of the offspring of those contextualized within enlightened humanist discourse as positioned within the realm of obedience,

Towards A Post-Western Humanism Made to the Measure of Those Recently Recognized as Human

267

particularly in Western cities, pose a consistent challenge or threat in the light of which an addressing of the ideas that Wynter elaborates may be seen as not only important but urgent. A gap in Wynter's thinking appears to lie within the practical consideration of what this post-western terrain might look like and how it might be entered. If the focus upon literary texts suggests a concern with literary humanism as a useful route, it is nonetheless to be approached with a measure of caution. Literary humanism certainly carries a significant potential in this respect, for, as Nethersole highlights, "it is in literature on the levels of content, language and intelligibility that we find expositions on how we encounter diverse practices" (643). Yet despite the most fulsome liberal claims for literary humanism, academic institutionsincluding literature departments-habitually reproduce civilized/savage differentiations in the textures of both curricula and faculty membership. The spirit of Hume's suspicion concerning "black" writing as "slender accomplishment" hovers above the borders and boundaries, protecting the teaching of canonical texts. Those borders remain almost solid though peripheral additions are undoubtedly accommodated dependent on the needs of the institution relative to its ethos and societal demands for equal opportunities employers. Can the humanist concerned with "the primacy of the word" be interested enough to negotiate a "clearing" where theoretical consciousness might encounter the literary representation of "lived experience" with a view to an enriched dialogue between text, reader and theorist, at times necessarily in the "discomfort zone"? Certainly social considerations urge action. At the same time, our humanities departments primarily concerned with matters of latter-day enlightenment central to which are the canonical texts, are often least likely to be touched by such everyday crises. In reality, it is only too often the case that a single committed and overstretched colleague assumes the responsibility of presenting and working with such a plurality of voices including those of "others" representing themselves, as in the minority discourse foregrounded here. Nonetheless, where urgency and care combine, a rare oasis marked by rich humanistic heteroglossia points the way to important beginnings for the human species. As Wynter urges, a post-western humanism should rupture or break with past practice to usher in the new practice pivotal to which are women and minorities who in the present order remain significantly "ontological others." She writes: It is clear here that Women and Minorities, taken together as a systemic

category, constitute the set of negative Ontological Others by means of which the descriptive statement of man-as-a-natural-organism, encoded in the figure of man, is stably brought into systemic being. This is the

268

Joan Anim-Addo

Towards A Post-Western Humanism Made to the Measure of Those Recently Recognized as Human

descriptive statement which our present organization of knowledge, including the discipline of literary criticism, was put in place to replicate. That is to say, the present forms of literary criticism and indeed all the disciplinary practices of our present episteme must accept, as its nonquestioned but founding presupposition, our encoding as the systemic set of negative Ontological Others by means of which the specifications of our present model of being, the figure of man (in place of the landed gentry's ideal Figure of the Yeoman), is maintained in being. (235)

Perhaps literary theory is needed now ... 1t is the literary critic who remembers that literature, as work in language, and theory as mediator between what is told and what is thought, are a discipline after all that requires careful, attentive and painstakingly close reading and listening across the gap created by the redrawn boundaries of globalization. (646)

That groups, often women, are urgently engaged in "potentially innovative contributions" such as that envisioned by Wynter is amply illustrated in, for example, Covi et ai's ReSisters in Conversation: Representation, Responsibility, Complexity, Pedagogy (2006). The collaborative feminist sub-group---a "community of seven researchers" from seven European universities-committed to negotiating a clearing to support a form of multi-voiced engagement that, multidisciplinary and multilingual, sought also the voices of the seemingly "radical other." The project was concerned with "the de-objectification of our present systems of theoretical absolutism," to borrow from Wynter (235). While the research group included several committed literary scholars, the reality was that their true concern with a diversity of literary voices was often constrained by material conditions in their institutions that served to limit this type of work to a minimum. In short, the peripheral positioning of such work needs to be altered as a first step. Additionally, though the group included a "minority" black scholar, the rarity of black scholars in Europe-particularly women-available to engage in such discourse serves only to underscore Wynter's demand for "urgently needed transformation." While Wynter foregrounds the system of understanding or body of ideas, a more primary concern to be addressed by post-Western humanism is that of the bodies of those who transmit knowledge and ideas. In other words, the over-representation of "Man" and correspondingly under-representation of black and ethnic minority women perhaps particularly in European universities and literature departments requires attention. In this respect, Wynter's notion of "negative identity" is appropriate in its signaling of a lack that still continues to inhibit our approach to knowledge and which "entails for us a spearheading role in the counter-exerting thrust" towards a post-Western humanism. The far-reaching implications of such a lack including those of the how and why of theory can only remain until that break with the past can be achieved. In the light of this, Nethersole's reflection seems layered:

269

The situation as I have attempted to illustrate it is that the inheritance of certain norms from Eurocentric humanism persists in its impact upon the production and reception of the writing that I have referred to as minority discourse. The questions remain: Who are the critics? Whose literature is being read? Moreover, while Equiano and many following in his footsteps have valiantly challenged the boundaries of who should be included as human and capable of reason, yet those boundaries continue to shape our outlook and practice today. There is now a palpable urgency in the need to provincialize this humanism and to replace it with one that is truly inclusive and truly allows different voices to speak. So, while it is the "permanent tension" highlighted by Chakrabarty that I have sought to illustrate, it is nonetheless the thought about "diverse ways of being human, the infinite incommensurabilities through which we struggle-perennially, precariously, but unavoidably-to 'world the earth' in order to live within our different senses of ontic belonging" (254) that motivates this articulation. From the "demonic ground" (Wynter, "Beyond" 371) that Wynter identifies I urge, in conclusion, a radical rethinking of the habits of tokenism and limited recognition associated with Western humanism, for the changes suggested necessarily require a revision of the literary canon as well as academic departments, publishing institutions and so on. Since this spells precisely the kind of change that in alllikelihood wilt continue to be resisted through tokenistic strategies seeking ever to avert the inevitable, some dialogic intervention is invited in the closing questions: Who is "listening across the gap"? When will it change?

Notes I Wynter's discussion of humanism over three decades is represented in a series of papers including "The Ceremony Must be Found: After Humanism" (1984), "Beyond Miranda's Meanings: Un/Silencing the Demonic Ground of Caliban's Woman" (1990) "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being! Power! Truth! Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresenlation - An Argument" (2003). 2 Philosopher, Immanuel Kant in the essay "On the Different Races of Man" draws on scientific reason of the period as the basis for discussion of prototypical

270

Joan Anim-Addo

distinction between what was considered to be the different species of man. At the bottom of the chain was the black man. Kant's views are further examined later in this essay. 3 An argument might similarly be made in relation to class. Yet, the difference between class and race in this respect is substantial given the ontological and political consequences for the erasure of black people's humanity in relation to race. 4 This argument was made at the Fifth International Conference on Caribbean Women's Writing, "Writing, Slavery and Diaspora," at Goldsmiths, University of London (27 April, 2007) in a paper entitled "Looking Back; Looking Forward: Sylvia Wynter, Miss Gatha and the Novel, Hills ofHebron." S In south east London, for example, the earliest documented parish record that I have researched is that of a "blackamore" who had been given the name Cornelius and who was buried in 1593 in the parish of St Margaret, Lee. For further details, see my Longest Journey: A History ofBlack Lewisham, (11-13). 6 Exploring ideas of property, Louis Kampf, "The Humanist Tradition in Eighteenth-Century England. And Today," points to Humphreys, for example, who wrote of property as "the foundation of Augustan civilization" and Macaulay, who wrote of property as "that great institution for the sake of which chiefly all other institutions exist, that great institution to which we owe all knowledge, all commerce, all industry, all civilization, all that makes us to differ from the tattooed savages of the Pacific Ocean" (Kampf 5). 7 June Jordan tellingly discusses this in relation to the eighteenth century black woman poet, Phillis Wheatley, whose writing needs also to be understood in the light of the prevailing mores ensuring that she was perceived by her white contemporaries as "3/5ths of a human being at best." 8 Importantly, there were voices arguing against the dominant ideas. Yet, these counter arguments only gained in significance as perceptions of the black human shifted in the anti-slavery era. 9 Hume was rebutted by fellow Scot, poet philosopher, James Beattie but Hume's ideas were further elaborated upon by Kant in a cycle of endorsement and counterendorsement. The parrot reference was made in relation to Francis Williams, a Jamaican who had been supported through Cambridge University. 10 In Touching the Body, I attempt to trace a genealogy of Anglophone AfricanCaribbean women's writing and to establish the group's literary history, one that is linked to both the region and Britain. In this chapter, I draw heavily on the volume. II The "black-people-equates-with-orang-utang" view stubbornly persists into the twenty-first century in racist European thought, as I shall develop further with reference to the playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah in London. 12 A notable exception was Phillis Wheatley who holds the distinction of having been simultaneously a poet and African slave in North America. See Touching the Body,78-81. 13 Prince's narrative is discussed in greater detail in Touching the Body (118-124) which examines the place of her text in the literary history of African-Caribbean women and the agency she negotiated in order to bring about its publication.

Towards A Post-Western Humanism Made to the Measure of Those Recently Recognized as Human

271

14 For a further discussion of women's activism in relation to slavery, see for example, my "Women Activists Against Enslavement" in the catalogue, Equiano, Ellslavement, Resistance and Abolition which accompanied the exhibition at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, 29 September-13 January 2008. IS I remember only too clearly abandoning my psychology course and its emphasis on what we now know to be class- culture- and race-bound IQ testing complete with justification of a racialized hierarchy of intellect in late sixties London, only to find that such curricular enthusiasms could not be escaped if one's interest was education, an area that demanded not only acquaintance with but some regurgitation of racist views in order to gain a qualification. 16 Kwei-Armah recounted the narrative in an address to the "Third Annual Huntley Conference: Looking to Africa-Garvey, Rasta and Rodney" at London South Bank University, on 16 February, 2008. 17 Questions concerning Interesting Narrative continue to probe, for example, whether Equiano did indeed experience an African childhood, as well as the sincerity of his Christian conversion. 18 This reference was made in my paper, "Black Women Narrating the PostWindrush Self: Selected Novels by Beryl Gilroy and Joan Riley" presented at the conference, "AfroEuropeans: Cultures and Identities" at the University of Leon, Spain, October 2006. Some of the ideas relating to Mary Prince are further explored in "Inventing the Self: An Introduction to the Black Woman Subject / Object in Britain from 1507" in I Am Black White Yellow: An Introduction to the Black Body in Europe. 19 This is developed further in Touching the Body (294-303). 20 This is not meant to detract in the least from the deserved success of the authors mentioned but rather to underscore the slim chances for black writers (in Britain and Europe more generally) of success, if that is measured in terms of awards, critical acclaim and access to the widest possible audience. As the flight out of Britain for black writers and academics indicate, the possibility of a global market for some writing is better realised from residence within other metropolitan centres.

Works Cited Anim-Addo, Joan. Touching the Body: History. Language and AfricanCaribbean Women's Writing. London: Mango Publishing, 2007. _. "Inventing the Self: An Introduction to the Black Woman Subject/Object in Britain from 1507." I Am Black While Yellow: An Introduction to the Black Body in Europe. Eds. Joan Anim-Addo & Suzanne Scafe. London: Mango Publishing, 2007.17-36. _. "Women Activists Against Enslavement." Equiano, Enslavement, Resistance and Abolition. Eds. Arthur Torrington, Rita McLean, Victoria Osborne and Ian Grosvenor. Birmingham: The Equiano

272

Joan Anim-Addo

Society & Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, 2007. 70-77. -. Longest Journey: A History of Black Lewisham, London: Deptford Forum Publishing, 1995. Barone, Thomas. "Persuasive Writings, Vigilant Reading, and Reconstructed Characters: the Paradox of Trust in Educational Storysharing." Life History and Narrative. Eds. J Amos Hatch and Richard Wisniewski. London: The Falmer Press, 1995. Brathwaite, Kamau. "Note(s) on Caribbean Cosmology: A Journal of Contemporary Culture." River City 16 (Summer, 1996): 1-17. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000. Covi, Giovanna. Jamaica Kincaid's Prismatic Subjects: Making Sense of Being in the World. London: Mango Publishing, 2003. Covi, Giovanna, et al. ReSisters in Conversation: Representation, Responsibility, Complexity, Pedagogy. Yorkshire: Raw Nerve Books, 2006. Derrida, Jacques. "The Ends of Man." Margins ofPhilosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by himself, printed for and sold by the author. London, 1789. Eze, Emmanuel, Chukwudi. Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. Gilroy, Beryl. Collected Writings: Leaves in the Wind. Ed. Joan AnimAddo. London: Mango Publishing, 1998. -. In Praise ofLove and Children, Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 1996. Hume, David. Essays. Literary. Moral and Political. London: Ward Lock and Co, 1748. Jordan, June. "The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America or Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley." Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afro-American Culture and the Contemporary Culture Literary Renaissance. Eds. Joanne Braxton & Andree Nicola McLaughlin. London: Serpent's Tail, 1990. Kampf, Louis. "The Humanist Tradition in Eighteenth-Century England. And Today." New Literary History, 3.1 (Autumn, 1971): 157-170. Linne, Karl von. A General System ofNature ... Translatedfrom Gmelin's last edition....amended and enlarged by the improvements and discoveries oflater naturalists,...London: W. Turton, 1806. Long, Edward. The History of Jamaica or. general survey of the ancient and modem state ofthat island. London: T. Lowdnes, 1774.

Towards A Post-Western Humanism Made to the Measure of Those Recently Recognized as Human

273

Lopez Springfield, Cosuelo. Daughters of Caliban: Caribbean Women in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. London: Picador, 1992. Nethersole, Reingard. "Models of Globalization," PMLA, 116:3 (May, 200 I), 638-649. Prince, Mary. The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave. Related by Herself With a Supplement by the Editor. To Which Is Added, the Narrative of Asa-Asa, a Captured African: Electronic Edition. 2000. Powell, Enoch. "Rivers of Blood." Birmingham Post, April 22, 1968. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism, London: Chatto & Windus, 1993. Seacole, Mary. The Wondeiful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857). Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988. Woodward, Helena. "African-British Writers: Champions of Freedom." Equiano. Enslavement. Resistance and Abolition. Eds. Arthur Torrington, Rita McLean, Victoria Osborne and Ian Grosvenor. Birmingham: The Equiano Society & Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, 2007. 62-69. Wynter, Sylvia. "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/PowerlTruthl Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its OverrepresentationAn Argument," CR: The New Centennial Review 3.3 (Fall 2003): 257337. _. "Beyond Miranda's Meanings: Un/Silencing the Demonic Ground of Caliban's Woman." Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature. Eds. Carole Boyce Davies & Elaine Savory Fido. New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1990.355-72. _. "On Disenchanting Discourse: 'Minority' Literary Criticism and Beyond," Cultural Critique, 7 (Autumn, 1987): 207-244. _. "The Ceremony Must be Found: After Humanism," boundary 2, 12:3 (1984): 19-70. _. The Hills ofHebron. London: Jonathan Cape, 1962.

La Dividua-A Gendered Figuration for a Planetary Humanism

CHAPTER ELEVEN LA DIVIDUA-A GENDERED FIGURAnON FOR A PLANETARY HUMANISM GIOVANNA COVI

Surely woman is, like man, a human being; but such a declaration is abstract. -Simone de Beauvoir, "Introduction," The Second Sex, 1949. One must become critical of "the human" to assert human rights [... ] human rights do not take the human as their ground but query the human as a site of power differentials. -Judith Butler, "Afterword," The Humanities in Human Rights, 2005.

I. An Address from Elsewhere Edward Said's worldliness, of course. What else could define the humanities for someone, like me, who entered the field under the influence of militant feminism-who actually found herself in the humanities for lack of, and out of frustration with, women's and gender studies departments-yet nevertheless continues to assert that her commitment to literature is aimed at thinking and practicing feminist ideas and actions? It feels in tune with my political motivations to value Said's imperative about critical thinking, his insistence on the locatedness of critical scrutiny, and the worldliness of cultural analysis aimed at speaking truth to power. And Jacques Derrida's dijJerance, of course. What else could be more in harmony with my feminist dream than his declaration that woman signifies the hope to resist logocentrism, the position from which philosophy must be redefined, since the condition of meaning and language is in that endless movement from the elements on the scene of

275

presence to those related to something other than themselves? Indeed, my determination to theorize in order to make feminist practice matter and my commitment to bringing the body into thinking and thus always trying to represent the not-yet possible makes me embrace deconstruction as an endless performative act that generates new effects (Derrida, Margins 13); as Derrida would put it, as an act of love which is not brought in from the outside but springs from the supplementarity within the text (Derrida, "Unpresentable" 82). Jointly, feminism and deconstruction have provided useful tools for my thinking. Each of them is neither a theory nor a philosophy, but rather, as Diane Elam lucidly argues, a "crossdiscipline"; and the two together, she convincingly demonstrates, open up the undecidability of justice and ethical responsibility. Derrida's reflections on the law underline the excessive nature of ethical responsibility. Drawing a distinction between law and justice, he defines justice as "incalculable" and states: "aporetic experiences are the experiences, as improbable as they are necessary, of justice, that is to say of moments in which the decision between just and unjust is never insured by a rule" (Elam 119). "It is impossible to do justice to justice," underscores Elam (120), in tune with Drucilla Cornell's emphasis on the necessity to posit the ethical as impossible in order to respect the otherness of the Other. Derrida's presentation of responsibility as a concept which is not pre-constituted particularly appealed to feminists seeking to negotiate their access to power outside the preconfigured horizon of authority. This freedom, for example, brought Elam to conclude that feminism and deconstruction can take on the project of "abyssal politics," "ethical activism," and "groundless solidarity" (120). Fifteen years later, I still find this project worthy. 1 actually believe that the polycentric web of globalized power increasingly and unquestionably urges us to act on the rift and to walk a tightrope to construct necessary, improbable and incalculable affiliations--embracing "abyssal politics," "ethical activism," and "groundless solidarity" may well be the only way. As both Said and Derrida encouragingly reassure, however, solid ground is provided by literature. Derrida states that literature is "the most interesting thing in the world, maybe more interesting than the world" (Derrida, "Strange Institution" 47), and Said in his uncompromising engagement with literary texts consistently reiterates his refusal to leave literature in an aseptic disciplinary isolation and recasts it instead as an indissoluble relation with history and geography (Said, "History" 470). Within the structure of address formulated by Nina Morgan and Mina Karavanta, there is nothing indeed outside the text and literature is the whole field of the humanities broadened by politics to include human

276

Giovanna Covi

rights and to interrogate the means by which critical consciousness forms and challenges the frames of recognition and representation linked to citizenship in a changing world. Feminism's concern for social justice nourished with, as well as brought to crisis by, the heterogeneous encounters offered by literary imagination can enrich a critical discourse in search of the ethical interruptions of the epistemological. 1 consider literature an empowering context within which to perform socially' transformative thinking. This is also by virtue of the literary capability of fusing thought with poetry, which paves the way to framing the question of the human in terms of an encounter, a temporary colloquy. Poetic thinking is that which accepts the "ungrounded grounding" of truth, the open and empty revelation of Dasein to a trace of alterity (Heidegger 52).1 Theorists think with poetry-Derrida with Celan, Heidegger with Holderlin, and Freud with Schiller, for instance-and poetry strengthens civil disobedience, as "Black is Beautiful" is declared to be the most outstanding American poem of late modernity.2 And Caribbean poet Audre Lorde made "poetry is not a luxury" a dictum, declaring poetry essential for those women who need to birth their silenced voices, to lift the structures that have denied their being, and to liberate their own complexity from sexism, racism, homophobia, and c1assism (Lorde, "Poetry" 37).

II. The Condition of VUlnerability Yet, together with these affiliations, 1 experience dissonance, too, and not only the dissonance between the Palestinian (in Egypt)-American and the (Jewish) Algerian-French intellectual, encapsulated in the following lapidary dismissal of the latter by the former: "it has always seemed to me, that the supreme irony of what Derrida has called logocentrism is that its critique, deconstruction, is as insistent, as monotonous, and as inadvertently systematizing as logocentrism itself" (Said, "Opponents" 128). I also experience the dissonance between the care which many feminists have devoted to the formulations of Said and Derrida and the casual simplifications (Derrida's) or substantial neglect (Said's) with which both of them have instead regarded feminist discourses. The parameters of their thinking utterly ignore the feminist framing that lets women speak and act, and my instinctive reaction is, "If I can't dance, I don't wanna be in your revolution." I prefer not to be trapped within an address that predetermines the course of the exchange. However, I must immediately admit that it is precisely what I call feminist commitment that is throughout defined by my acceptance of the

La Dividua-A Gendered Figuration for a Planetary Humanism

277

address of others. Feminism is the reaction to the patriarchal address and the effort to change its structure. As bell hooks repeatedly makes clear, feminism is about ending institutionalized sexism; I would add that feminism will happily cease to be when sexism dies, in all its manifestations? But sadly so far, sexism and racism, which are a pair, are doing pretty well. Awareness of a multicultural world has progressively made feminism conscious that patriarchy manifests itself in different ways and it is struggling to compare and account for them without subsuming difference to sameness. Thus I have been constantly pressed to regard different existential conditions, multiple forms of gendered hierarchy and sexual discrimination and, with these, to start a conversation in the attempt to move beyond a mapping of differences and weave possible exchanges and collaborations and to dream future understandings and a wider shared knowledge and access to power-no easy networking but a rewarding effort. Structured by the address of another-patriarchy---outside itself, feminism is restructuring its response through multiple confrontations with the addresses of the others-feminisms-within itself. From this standpoint, how can I then articulate my response to the invitation to regard the contributions of these two intellectuals to the question of the human and human rights, and the relation of these with the contemporary humanities (a radically changed derivation of umanesimo and Humanismus)? First, I must say that the question feels so huge that I perceive it as ungraspable and feel dwarfed. And yet, I am aware that it is within this colossal field that I address my simple and yet deeply fundamental concern: countering and preventing the dissemination of violence, firstly and specifically the violence against women. This additional specification does not represent an ideological stand. As Jean Franco pointedly observes, "all too often in the past [rape has] been considered the inevitable complement of war" (Franco 1664); I want to underline that "in the past" refers to the years before 2002, with the publication of the Integration ofthe Human Rights of Women and the Gender Perspective, which declares: "rape in the conduct of armed conflicts constitutes a war crime and may constitute a crime against humanity" (Coomaraswam qtd. in Franco 1664). Franco observes that the 200 I trial against the rape crimes committed by Serbs in Bosnia in 1993 is still considered an isolated event. Silence in general heavily characterizes this historically old and widespread war crime. I want to foreground that sexual violence is used as a weapon of war to annihilate entire groups of people-it is a racist armament. Looking at the data in a country at peace in 2006-07, an alarming comparison can be drawn. The figures related to acts of violence against women for 2006-07 as issued by the Italian

278

Giovanna Covi

government show that violence causes more deaths and invalidism than cancer among women between 14 and 50; that violent attacks against women have increased by 22 percent in one year; that the primary victims are women professionals holding higher degrees; and that 62 percent of these abuses qualifY as domestic violence. Thus, the territory of war for women in a country at peace is the horne. But what about the women who do not even enter into the statistical data? The less emancipated women who likely suffer similar violence but must bury it in silence? Franco offers the example of the destruction perpetrated through rape of the indigenous communities in Peru and Guatemala during the civil wars in the 1980s and 1990s and thus argues that shame has made these war crimes invisible. I would contend that the invisibility of war crimes is the grounding for the invisibility of peace crimes. Giorgio Agamben has identified civil world war as the inevitable consequence of the reduction to norm of "the state of exception," the interregnum in which the distinction between auctoritas and potestas are suspended and which today has reached its maximum planetary spread (the state of exception of Peru and Guatemala being just one of the many instances that go together with the state of exception declared by the USA and its allies since the war on terror was declared). Within the state of exception, the Derridean "force de /a /oi" remains a force but the law is put under erasure--it becomes a force of the law without the law. Under these conditions, politics is being reduced to juridical politics, which is equivalent to saying that it ceases to function as politics-i.e., as the activity which can sever the link between violence and the law. The actual elimination of politics, Agamben concludes, is the lethal weapon that disseminates civil war around the whole planet. A feminist perspective on the social conditions of the planet tragically supports this disturbing projection.

III. Framing My Address Motivated to reflect on the human and the humanities by this concern with increasing violence, I want to raise three related questions: How to represent and access a more hospitable human? How to represent and access a human that is gendered and plural? How to represent and access a human that is not grounded on the exclusion of the animal and earth? Judith Butler provides the premise for this reflection, by arguing that the question of human rights is necessarily connected to the notion of the human. Indeed, she ponders whether the human exists outside the juridical law, outside a subject position. She further argues that the relationship

La Dividua-A Gendered Figuration for a Planetary Humanism

279

between the notion of the human and the norms of human rights compels critical interventions that involve problems of ethics and problems of translation between the two modes of discourse. In words that simplify Butler's fine argument, human rights cannot take the human as their ground since the human is established within the juridical frame of human rights themselves and, consequently, it is the task of human rights to query the human as a site of power differentials. Stripped of its metaphysical aura, the question of the human as a question of power relationships feels more manageable to me. It actually becomes a crystal clear issue with reference to the past and present silence of too many groups of women and an equally transparent program in its call for a jointly theoretical and pragmatic intervention. The question of speakability-Gayatri Spivak's question of whether the Subaltern speaks (Critique 269)-is at the same time a question of recognition. Butler observes, "without media no suffering can be known" (Butler, "Afterword" 1661). As the question is not only who can speak, but also, who can recognize and receive the claim, I cannot subtract myself from the interpellation. The question of the human, human rights, and the humanities is no longer out of my range--it is praxis as well as theory, and it is relational. To rephrase Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua's words, it is "theory made in the flesh" with other bodies.4 Their theory of a transfrontera feminista is conversant lwith Eduard Glissant's "poetics of relation" and with the theory of creolite. Butler provides further valid support for pursuing this investigation, as she lets me understand that I can personally enter this field of inquiry. 1 find it more comfortable to begin with the personal, which is always also the political. In Giving an Account ofOneself, Butler analyzes the meaning of ethics under difficult living conditions and offers a thorough investigation of the relationship between identity and responsibility. Under vexed socio-cultural conditions, she argues, self-knowledge is limited, flawed, and weak and '''becoming human' is no simple task" (103). She invokes Adorno to declare that "what is needed above all is that consciousness of our own fallibility" (Adorno qtd. in Butler, "Giving" 104). Upon this constitutive limit, she grounds her redefinition of responsibility to emphasize, via Foucault, that the subject is constituted through her own speaking and thus the account she gives of herself cannot be understood outside the interlocutory scene (112). Thus, telling the truth about oneself implies confronting the question of power, which is to say that ethics must become critique (124). This way, subjects constitute themselves as they perform their own telling the truth about themselves, in response to an address which comes from the outside; the subject is cast in the context of an address to another as a historical formation, a negotiation

280

Giovanna Cov;

with the forces of power in place, in the context of the address, and as a performance of its own telling the truth about oneself to another. Butler lucidly conflates questions of truth, power, and rhetoric in her analysis of subject-formation to embrace the need for critical thinking; she shows that the question of the subject is a moral question precisely because it exposes the question of how the human is constituted (134). Indeed, casting subjectivity within the conversation between the emerging "I" and "another" lifts the question of responsibility out of the frame of a narcissistic, self-sufficient individualism. In this deep and original exploration, Butler convincingly invites us to take the risk of picturing ourselves as human at the very moment when we are compelled to redefine the human together with another. I want to honor Butler's invitation and will try to put it into effect as I engage the present collaborative effort to re-present humanistic practice in the yet-to-come, actively-participated, democratic, global community. In so doing, I am aware that I am taking a double risk: the personal risk of giving an account of myself that may lead me into the abyss of aporetic experience and the political risk of begetting actions and alliances that lead me elsewhere and in unexpected company. Synchronized with the Derridean idea of an un-prefigured responsibility, Butler recognizes that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chances of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance--to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient "I" as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven. (Butler, "Giving" 136) I hope this is so. To move to my second question-how to represent and access a human that is gendered and plural?-I find it important to avoid encapsulating Butler's argument into the phrase "to be undone by another" and foreground instead the phrase that precedes it: "to become undone in relation to others. " I want to situate the subject and the human unequivocally within an endless flow of different relations with changing and diverse others. What gives the subject a chance "of becoming human"-feminism has well taught me-is precisely the relations with a plurality of others that always already compel it to recast both itself as

La Dividua-A Gendered Figuration for a Planetary Humanism

281

well as the concept woman-the self becoming one of many possible women-in a fractalic web of relations. A wider participation of different groups of women to the articulation of feminism has increasingly challenged the singular abstraction woman and forced us to adopt plural framings and to speak rather of "women," "feminisms," and "gender and its others," thereby producing more complex and multivocal articulations, even though much more remains to be done, not simply to include more constituencies but to recast feminisms paradigmatically together with them. The imperative for some time now has been to regard gendered multiculturalism and postcolonialism, and within the context of this inquiry the commitment of many feminists has been to produce gendered cross- and inter-culturality. This is not an easy task, as witnessed, for example, by the debate provoked by Susan Moller Okin's essay, "Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? ", which signals the tensions that may arise when the defense of the rights of a specific cultural group prevail over the rights of the women within the group, with the added complication of establishing who may define the rights of subaltern women whose voices are buried in silence or cannot be translated. But it is a task which can be undertaken from the vantage point of the experience gathered since the 1970s, starting with the first breaches cut into white liberal feminism by lesbianism and womanism and soon followed by the series of other challenging crises produced by the input of other constituencies. If one year after the UN General Assembly's adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Simone de Beauvoir declared it "abstract" to consider woman, "like man, a human being," as in the epigraph above, since the early 1980s, feminism has started to consider "woman" "abstract" altogether. Now, Judith Butler is inviting us to consider that also the concept of the human sits on abstract ground. In order to proceed along this factual-fictional terrain towards a possible articulation of human rights for women, I perceive it as progressively more imperative to reach for poetry-indeed, "for women, then, poetry is not a luxury" (Lorde 37). Butler's invitation to think about the human starting from the subject provides a comfortable forum, the more so because it is hospitable to the feminist practice of thinking about the subject by starting from oneself which is in step with the feminist autobiographical tradition. Adriana Cavarero has neatly emphasized the link between self-consciousness and the narration of one's life, an act which can present risks but also opportunities for self-transformation. The feminist dictum that the personal is the political has helpfully not been shaken off. Indeed, it continues to be at the center of feminist critical thinking, as poignantly

282

Giovanna Covi

witnessed, for example, again by Cavarero (1995) in her thorough analysis of the exclusion of the female body from the polis, and more recently by Butler and Spivak's exchange on the state, Who Sings the Nation State? (2007) which provides a provocative critique of Agamben's notion of 6 "bare life" outside of the polis. On the contrary, they emphasize that there can be no life altogether outside of the polis, since the political must be widened to include all networks of power, and language must be created to grant citizenship to the destitute. I find their conversation particularly inspiring, since its emphasis on performative politics encourages us to mobilize the humanities for the realization of freedom. I will thus struggle to respond to her call focusing on myself in relation to others through literature, in a language that is not as purely philosophical as hers, but rather one that is more contaminated with terms from other structures of thinking, cultural as well as linguistic, and with words that connote practical experiences and political action. My effort is aimed at accounting for the border zone between the philosophical human and the political human right, by making translation visible as I consider the question of gendered agency within the matrix of contemporary global powers. This question is addressed under the pressure of a growing concern for the indifference and violence that characterize human relations in social contexts officially described as multicultural, and it is raised with the commitment to socio-cultural transformation. For generational and locational reasons linked to social class and racial identity as well, I was initially influenced by "feminist individualism in the age of imperialism" (Spivak 116) and came slowly to gain consciousness of the need for multicultural perspectives. My reading of Jane Eyre, for example, was focused on the heroine's subjectivity and for long remained blind to the possibility that Bertha, pictured as a wildly mad beast, could be anything else but Jane's psychic Other. Jean Rhys came later to give life to Bertha and show me that her bestial character was indeed human. And it required the help of texts by African-Caribbean and AfricanAmerican women to make me see that Christophine could have continued her story and become fully human, too. Of course, the theoretical elaboration of this process was then fully explicated by Spivak (112-197). Colonialism had imposed a regime of segregation dividing colonizers from colonized as human from savage--wild, beastly, animal. It was Donna Haraway's concept of "natureculture" that first made me see clearly the equation and appreciate the epistemological implications of crossing, not only the boundary between me and you, but also the boundary between human and animal, and between human and machine. In Primate Visions (1989), she explores the connection between colonialism and

La Dividua-A Gendered Figuration for a Planetary Humanism

283

anthropocentrism; in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991), she proclaims war on logocentrism and Western Humanismus by embracing a fusion with animals and machines; in Companion Species (2003) and more thoroughly in When Species Meet (2008), she investigates the vulnerability of signifying diversity in the context of biopower and technoscience and identifies in the relationship between human and dog, a relationship that is based on translation, a conscious attempt to bring together nonharmonious actions and envision the difficult but necessary task of a future shared with different beings. It is with Haraway that I raise my third question: how to represent and access a human that is not grounded on the exclusion of the animal and earth? It is clear to me that the groundless ground of the human must have permeable boundaries around a mixed space. Gloria Anzaldua's mestiza on the borderland captures both the implications for locationist, historically-specific significance related to the region on the border between the United States of Mexico and the United States of America and for non-Iocationist cultural meanings produced by the power of the figuration beyond its specific constituency? More recently, Leela Gandhi's Affective Communities has cOJUugated anti-colonialism with vegetarianism and animalism in ways that help me envision a decolonialized future outside andlor beside the colonial frame. Taking seriously Said's critique of colonial and nationalist anti-colonial binarisms, of the "us" and "them" opposition, and his proposal to engage instead a "contrapuntal perspective" (Said, Culture 36), Gandhi challenges a postcolonial revisionism which "through the tropes of 'hybridity,' 'interstitiality,' 'mimicry' and the 'in-between'" (3) becomes disinterested in anticolonial actors who operate within the Manichean divide. "Faced with an ultimately unsatisfactory theoretical choice between the oppositional but repetitive forms of cultural nationalism on the one hand and the subversive but quietist discourse of hybridity or contrapuntality on the other," Gandhi invites to reengage "the colonial archive for more selfconsciously creative forms of anti-imperialism, especially in its Western or metropolitan articulation" (6). She argues that these expose a perception of the imperial periphery as an undifferentiated, horizontal terrain that gave possibility to a new politics of the unlikely conjunction and conjuncture according to which sexual dissidence, the struggle for animal rights, (proto)-post-humanist spiritualism and religious heterodoxy, pro-suffrage activism and socialism could each be regarded as varieties of antiimperialism... the promise of ideal community, a utopian order of things. (8)

284

Giovanna Covi

Gandhi lucidly and thoroughly articulates relational politics as a "noncommunitarian understanding of community" (20), by joining together, among others, Cornell's ethics of "the beyond" committed to a transformation of the present with Haraway's permanently monstrous and illegitimate cyborg community and with Derrida's notions of hospitality and friendship. It makes sense to me to add Edward Said's defense of the exilic intellectual to the picture of Gandhi's affective cosmopolitanism' based on a definition of politics which is friendship-a groundless but solid relation. With this added invitation not to simply rest on the hybrid border, but to explore simultaneously both the home and the foreign land, I proceed to defme my positioning.

IV. La Dividua My address is located in Europe; it is articulated in a global English that makes an effort to show the Italian language through which I also think and in any case to let the original be seen through the translation; it is composed of the discourses of feminist theory (plus poststructural, postmodern, and postcolonial theories, and cultural studies), and it is nourished by the lyrical philosophies of writers, mostly women and largely of African heritage from the USA and the Caribbean. Therefore, my address is built on the knowledge of cultures different from my own-in the way that I, as an Italian, have been able to understand these Anglophone literatures of the Americas as focused on gender and race. It is thus not only an ethical and a political question, but also a cultural question; it self-consciously inhabits the rhetoricity of language. Central to this knowledge is the issue of alterity-not only because I teach and study foreign literatures, but also because I (a white woman) focus my attention mainly on black women writers. In other words, as I articulate my disciplinary knowledge I am expected to assume the voice of the outside observer. Yet I struggle to resist the assumption that casts me as the recipient of the native informant's words and tend instead to foreground the encounter and make sense of its outcome. g I am no less interested in the question of who am I than in the question of who you are. Rather, I approach texts by black women writers by asking, repeatedly, who am I in relation to you? Methodologically, I position myself in the feminist space where activism and scholarship try to meet; I struggle to weave a discourse and engage action in which the materiality of bodies and lived experience speak and act together with ethics, politics, and theory. From this position of multiple relationality, I aim at foregrounding those discursive tools that may oppose the endurance of patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist structures

La Dividua-A Gendered Figuration for a Planetary Humanism

285

within contemporary cultures. To this aim, I propose la dividua as a figuration of resistance to sexist, racist, and imperialistic globalization-to the artistic and cultural production of an exclusive and limited humanity packaged within the myth of multicultural and multiethnic democracy. Starting from the observation that the concept of the human is traditionally regarded as linked to that of the individual-the human is an individual to start with, and human rights are primarily the rights of individuals-I notice that the term individual is synonymous for person. Individual refers to a distinct, indivisible entity: a human being distinguishable from the group, a single organism capable of independent existence, that which cannot be divided. In other words, individual evokes the phallic and singular self of modernity; it is modernity, indeed, to have invented the individual (Cacciari 121), and the standard image of perfection for the individual which also embodies the perfection of the created universe is that of Leonardo's Vetruvian Man, produced, by the way, in the same year as Christopher Columbus's first voyage to America. The gendered Italian language further reinforces this perception: individuo is both a masculine (universal) noun and an adjective used in literary form to indicate the indivisible, as in "santa e individua Trinita" (holy and individual Trinity).9 My purpose is to contribute to the development of a discourse that resists these inherited associations and thus proposes instead representations of subjectivity that struggle to counter the separation of Self from Other. As compellingly argued by Elena Pulcini, this conception of the individual leads to pathological forms of individualism and generates a deficit of solidarity and a loss of community which clearly mars contemporary society. She articulates the idea of the contaminated or wounded subject, a subject capable of joining desire and care, whose Self is conscious of its own limitations and its desire for the Other. The contaminated subject-contaminated by its passion for the other-is conceived within the philosophy of the gift (Pulcini 149-66), which, by way of the Derridean concepts ofthe gift, hospitality, and friendship, leads to the connected articulation of the concept of passionate responsibility, enabling the subject to relate to others not in the name of altruism but out of necessity and in order to build a community not for others but with others (Pulcini 167-179). In line with this train of thought and in order to derail the diseased discourse individualism, I have coined the term la dividua-a feminine (embodied) noun which is offered to refer to that which can be divided, and which is relational, multiple, fractioned, and as such evokes (but is not grounded in) the body of the mother. Starting with This Sex Which is Not

286

Giovanna Covi

One in 1977, through Ethique de fa difference sexuelle in 1984, that is, for 30 years now, Luce Irigaray has been richly and consistently elaborating a subjectivity which is the one and the other at the same time. From Irigaray, I have learnt that I can say, "I am, because there is a You who is listening to my speaking myself and reassures me that my spoken I will be in turn narrated to someone else." In this vein, I conceive the term fa dividua as culturally affiliated (not necessarily naturally filiated, according to Said's ~ renowned differentiation) to the dividual (in Italian it dividuo. a universal masculine noun) which, in arithmetical division, refers to the parts of the dividend. My proposed new coin, fa dividua, wishes to retain this relational meaning charged, in addition, with a gendered feminine connotation to underline that difference and relationality-not universality-are the primary marks of subjectivity: I exist because You are listening to me, and through your listening you reassure me of my existence; I exist because, in the world there are always two of us, because at the beginning I was two; I exist as a gendered female subject because 1O my lips represent hospitality and exchange. "At the most intimate levels, we are social; we are comported toward a 'you'," declares Butler, as she rejects the notion of the subject as individual to propose instead "a model for agency and intelligibility," "a precondition of political agency" (Butler, Precarious 45, 49). La dividua is a representation of cultural and political agency by subjectivities engaged in building "planetarity"-i.e., "inscribing collective responsibility as right" (Spivak, Death 102); it aims likewise at redefining humanism in terms of rights for the alterities that represent the human as the widest spectrum of diversities that extend beyond and beside the boundary of the purely human to include "natureculture" contaminations with machines and animals and to represent an inclusive sense of reality. I I Such reality is mapped by a complex network of "periperformative ulterances" which are positioned "beside" one another in order to resist narratives of origin and telos and thus embrace instead a phenomenology of the affects, an epistemology that interrogates emotions as well as ideas and actions-a theory-practice of the "touching feeling" as elaborated by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and a Butlerian query of the human that constantly confronts definitions of the self. Finally, fa dividua is meant to figure the slow process towards "the decolonialization of language and thought" (Carter 75), which is needed to construct Gandhi's "affective communities" and deploy a "politics of friendship." And this is so because fa dividua is inspired by Pulcini's constructive figuration of the contaminated subject-as temporal, as relational agency determined by emotions and by her passion for the other. She is pregnant with the ethics

La Dividua-A Gendered Figuration for a Planetary Humanism

287

of care, yet not so much for her special generosity and altruism (as the original definition offered by Carol Gilligan may lead us to believe), but rather because of her constitutional need for the other. But even more compellingly, fa dividua knows that "to be human is to be intended toward the other" (Spivak 73). Spivak writes "toward"-not for, nor with the other. Her planetarity allows us to inhabit the world as a species of alterity and to do so "on loan," to think through an endless taxonomy of alterities and, most importantly, to cast alterity as underived from us (Spivak 73). A planetary dividua struggles to be "responsible, responsive, answerable"to inscribe "collective responsibility as right" and "experience the impossible" (Spivak 102). Within this planetary space, I envision fractal relationsI2-colorful, mobile, multi-dimensional, changing, and unexpectedly muting prisms-each one at different moments and in various places moving toward one of the others. There is no line of Is and YOlls linked by ands: there is no progress taking us nowhere beyond; rather, on the planetary ungrounded and fictional-factual map, Cornell's "ethics of the beyond" makes room for Sedgwick's spatial theory-practice of "the beside." Described as a non-dualistic preposition which allows a number of elements to lie "alongside one another," thinking built around this preposition "permits a spacious agnosticism about several of the linear logics that enforce dualistic thinking" without depending on "a fantasy of metonymically egalitarian or even pacific relations." Sedgwick explains:

Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identilYing, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivalring, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations. (8) Moreover, fa dividua accepts the vulnerability of human existence, "a vulnerability to the other that is part of bodily life, a vulnerability to a sudden address from elsewhere that [she] cannot preempt" but rather must altend to as she defines a politics accountable for bodily existence (Butler, Precarious 28-9). It provides a grounding for a groundless subjectivity that may also stimulate the need for the humanities, as suggested by Butler in the conclusion of Precarious Life, to return us to the human where we do not expect to find it, in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense. We would have to interrogate the emergence and vanishing of the human at the limits of what we can know, what we can hear, what we can see, what we can sense. This might prompt us to reinvigorate the intellectual projects of critique, of questioning, of coming to understand the difficulties and demands of cultural translation and dissent, and to create a sense of the public in which

288

La Dividua-A Gendered Figuration for a Planetary Humanism

Giovanna Covi

their own reflective lives" (214). In the fmal pages of the novel, while we see Pecola's madness, these vulnerable witnesses manage to elaborate their experience of violence into cognition. They have matured to the point of recognition and admission: "We had failed her... We avoided Pecola Breedlove-forever" (204); they have come to understand that Pecola was no Other from them. Their relation was reciprocally dependent:

oppositional voices are not feared, degraded or dismissed, but valued for the instigation to a sensate democracy they occasionally perform. (151) The challenge is immense but unavoidable.

V. How Do You Do That? "How do you do that? I mean, how do you get somebody to love you?" (Morrison 32), asks Pecola in Toni Morrison's 1970 novel The Bluest Eye. The narrator is too young to know, and Frieda is asleep. Pecola's address falls into silence, and the abandonment of her call initiates the despair of her entire life. In Morrison's first novel, neglect, violence, and deception bring Pecola to madness. In 1994, the novel was reissued with an "Afterword" pointing out that Pecola's story itself had also fallen into silence as Morrison's call, and text, had been abandoned for twenty-five years: "With very few exceptions, the initial publication of The Bluest Eye was like Pecola's life: dismissed, trivialized, misread" (216). Pecola's tragedy could be faced neither by the community within which the story unfolds in 1941 nor by critics for a quarter of a century-"The damage done was total," observes the narrator in the final pages (204). Morrison had to break the silence about Pecola a second time to explain why she had to do so the first time-but "since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how" (6). I propose to consider The Bluest Eye a reflection on the vulnerability of human existence. It certainly thematizes the cultural racism that prevents black American girls from picturing themselves as beautiful, and it unquestionably denounces the social racism and sexism that has wounded their community; it also historicizes the conditions under which racialized America entered the devastation of World War II. But the theoretical interrogation focuses on human vulnerability. Morrison declares that some aspects of Pecola's "woundability were lodged in all young girls" (210) and identifies as a central problem in the narrative the fact that "the weight of the novel's inquiry on so delicate and vulnerable a character could smash her and lead readers into the comfort of pitying her rather that an interrogation of themselves for the smashing" (211). The author's declared intent to interpellate the readers is of fundamental significance for my argument, as I will discuss below. Morrison also emphasizes that she wanted a story about rape told by the victim and potential victims, by the girls; she specifies: "And since the victim does not have the vocabulary to understand the violence or its context, gullible, vulnerable girlfriends, looking back as the knowing adults they pretended to be in the beginning, would have to do that for her, and would have to fill those silences with

289

,

We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. (205) Even though the novel ends with the desolate words, "it's much, much, much too late" (206), it leaves us with the hopeful gift of the awareness gained by the vulnerable girls, an awareness derived from their commitment to the telling of Pecola's story. The final and hopeful gift to the readers is in the narrator's breaking of the silence and the how of her telling, certainly not in the factual knowledge of the dismal details of Pecola's life. Yet it isn't only the awareness of the relation between Pecola and the other vulnerable girls that grows; it is also the awareness of the changing frame within which the narrator must put Pecola's story that is empowering, for all vulnerable girls and readers as well. The Bluest Eye is about a shattered life and a shambles of a community, but it does not seek pity nor offer comfort. It is an invitation to share the narrator's impossible task of representing the inhuman as a victim of the humans, as she raises the question of how not to smash her. Pecola's wish for blue eyes represents her total denial of herself as human; she, though, is abused and deceived by characters who are represented as superior to her status. As the absolute victim in the story, she forces us to address ethical and political questions of representation and responsibility towards the human. What corrections in our picture of the human are we called to make to include Pecola and Cholly, who "loved her enough to touch her," though "his touch was fatal"? (206). The question grows around the idea of love and leads into the unsayable, in ways that are further and more deeply explored in Beloved. The story investigates the ragged edges of love, queries the appearance and disappearance of the human that love generates, and compels its definition. This is what the story does. The readers who do not withdraw into the comfort of pitying Pecola, but agree to interrogate "the smashing" must do more-they are forced to engage the triple address I have been discussing: How to represent and access a more hospitable, gendered, racialized, and plural human that is not grounded on exclusion? In so doing, 1 suggest, they become dividue.

290

Giovanna Covi

Morrison has been critical of her formal achievement, claiming that the novel fails to "handle effectively the silence at its center: the void that is Pecola's 'unbeing'," as it is unable "to secure throughout the work the feminine subtext that is present in the opening sentence (the women gossiping, eager and aghast in 'Quiet as it's kept')" (215). Indeed Morrison's ambition "to shape a silence while breaking it" (212) was perhaps unachievable. Yet, this is the essential goal. Spivak clarifies this point when she cogenlly expresses the necessity to believe in "the impossible undivided world of which one must dream, in view of the impossibility of which one must work, obsessively" (Spivak, Critique 383). The Bluest Eye offers reasons why this impossible task fails, which agree with Spivak's theory about social transformation. As the narrator brings the story to its close, she offers her comments on the meaning of love. She declares, "love is never any better than the lover," and adds, "the lover alone possesses his gift of/ove. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover's inward eye" (Morrison 206). It is as if the narrator of Pecola's life was compelled to annihilate love in order to tell this story. The novel ends on this tragic key, but the waste land in which it leaves us provides the means to continue the journey and move somewhere else. Not here, however. No. Here, "it's much, much, much too late," but the definition of love articulated in the waste land opens the possibility of other definitions of love. Its existence, propelled by utopia, although immature, is "the ethical hallmark-the crucial ingredient-in that politics of friendship" which is imbued with "affiliative solidarity between diffuse groups and individuals" (Gandhi 10-12). As we tum the last page of The Bluest Eye, we are equipped to start our travel away from the given definition of love. As we look into the future that rises from our understanding of Pecola's sacrifice, we give shape to the consciousness of what Spivak proclaims to be required in order to engage the impossible but necessary dream of ecological justice: "the supplementation of collective effort by love," which itself is "an effort-over which one has no control yet at which one must not strain-which is slow, attentive on both sides." Questioning "how does one win the attention of the subaltern without coercion or crisis," Spivak emphasizes that the effort must be "mindchanging on both sides," because "without the mind-changing oneon-one responsible contact nothing will stick" (Spivak, Critique 383). Nothing could stick indeed in Pecola's world, and everything and everyone is left waddling about. The readers, however, can diagnose the problem at the core of this devastation: a dysfunctional definition of love.

La Dividua-A Gendered Figuration for a Planetary Humanism

291

The Bluest Eye also takes us farther into the episode that marks Pecola's final destruction-the death of the old dog. Soaphead Church's hate for the animal is uncompromising and is matched only by Pecola's hate for herself; his pursuit of the death of the dog is as passionately blind as her pursuit of blue eyes. When Pecola is tricked into going to feed the old dog, Morrison gives us a glimpse of Pecola's wish for a relationship. The girl does more than feed the dog; she reaches towards the animal to "touch his head, stroking him gently" (176). In one sole instant, she is made to realize that the dog, instead of eating, is being poisoned, is stumbling and choking and about to die. Her reaction is shattering; her physical rejection of the reality of this further violence--which she was yet again too vulnerable to foresee-expresses her status as victim, not criminal. The old dog that provides the occasion for furthering the damage done to Pecola is granted the dignity of a name, Bob. Bob and Pecola share a gentle touch, if only for an instant. This humane scene is an expression of love between human and animal-an effort, Haraway points out, of communication across species within the field of natureculture that entails the experiencing of new forms of love under conditions of absolute respect for the signifying diversity of each part. The relationship deconstructs the divided question of human rights versus animal rights to ask instead how we can establish a relationship between different species that is founded on rights. This crossing of the abstracI boundaries upon which an abstract human has been grounded is clear to me: depending on the means and the degree of the injury, I know that my impaired vision may be variously aided by a dog, a stick, a pair of lenses, a computerized device, or an organ transplant. In all cases, this "contamination" with another human, a machine, or an animal will give me my new vision and new ways to derme myself in the world. But one does not need to be physically impaired to experience these forms of "contamination." In the most joyous way, one needs simply 10 experience communication with a pet animal; on a daily basis, one needs simply to account for the technical devices that simulate our presence and maintain our relationships, such as answering machines; and in any social context, one must always relate with others. The scene of this intra-species relationship in The Bluest Eye lasts but one instant, enough to show ils possibility. It is immediately stopped by the economics of violence that regulates the story. Within this norm, Pecola's gentle stroke of Bob's head can only signify her "unbeing," her less than human status which ranks her with the animal. But readers are meant to see beyond this economy and dream a human that does not need to exclude the animal in order to be. Outside The Bluest Eye there is a world full of hope-an impossible dream that only the telling of

292

Giovanna Covi

the void at the center of Pecola's heart could make available for those of us who are prepared to become dividue and who risk interrogating "the emergence and vanishing of the human at the limits of what we can know" (Butler, Precarious lSI). Le dividue move obsessively towards the impossible world of justice (Spivak, Critique 383); they occasionally perform a democracy in which otherness is not terrifYing; they embrace the point of view of powerless victims of violence to rethink the human' without horror (Cavarero); they enact Derridean ideas of friendship and hospitality to deploy anti-imperial politics; and they resist the miserliness of power not only by opposing systematic segregations among people, but also by resisting systematic segregations of the animal and the machine from the human (Gandhi 177-89).

VI. In Conversation In my impossible dream of ecological justice the planet is inhabited by a community of dividue-and they are all differently beautiful. They are community builders, precisely because they cannot cast themselves within the dichotomy self versus society. Le dividue exist "towards" others and become themselves only (but not solely) as they themselves speak and are heard, through a relationality which is constitutional not volitional. Communication marks their achievements; the associational interconnectedness of conversation characterizes their action; and the creation of words, images, gestures defines their thinking. They weave tapestries with all kinds of threads-and they are beautiful, differently beautiful. Their beauty is contaminated with the experience of need and want and stands opposite to the Kantian narcissistic disinteredness that paralyzes the will and wrenches from the beautiful the promise of happiness (Gandhi ISS). Theirs is the beauty of "Black is beautiful." Their beauty belongs to the Heideggerian domain of art and poetry which "is a realm that simultaneously dwells among and gives dwelling to difference, is a space hospitable to the singular and the non-identical, one that offers refuge to the ineluctable thingness of things, preserving the rich assortment of the world." Gandhi names this realm "interested autonomy," thus correcting Said's "interestedness" to make sure that historicism is not divorced from aestheticism (161). Elaine Scarry may suggest that the tapestries woven by Ie dividue are beautiful because they are just; justice and beauty, she argues, share a search for harmony and balance through relations with others (Scarry, Beauty 112). In my impossible dream this is so.

La Dividua-A Gendered Figuration for a Planetary Humanism

293

According to Steven Taylor, beauty is situated on the border between identity and difference; this is what gives beauty the capacity to conjugate death with life. As such, beauty counters the modem idea of identity as individualism (383-4). Le dividue's struggle against sexism and racism is a struggle against exclusionary definitions, such as the multicultural boundaries that confme people within given ethnic groups-a profitable marketing strategy but a dreary political project which risks the reproduction of ghettoized societies. Taylor offers a reading of Saffo's fragment declaring that beautiful is that which one loves, rather than what one likes. Via Saffo, he espouses the classical cultural ideal represented by Aphrodites, which joins beauty and love-the continuous, temporal doing and undoing of their relationship--as opposed to the Platonic ideal that associates beauty with goodness within a fixed structure. It is Aphrodites that prompts Penelope to weave/unweave, thus challenging the delusion that art must have a single end-aesthetics. On the contrary, and to put Gandhi's suggestion that beauty has an "interested autonomy" in Taylor's words, beauty is a trickster, ambiguous, unexpected: we must learn to appreciate it without ever renouncing critical thinking and through the assumption of responsibility required by the social implications of beauty (390-1). And Scarry notes that, since it is precisely through human action that beauty and justice are produced, preserved and renovated, their production requires the adoption of a relational human identity. This thought speaks to me more forcefully and beautifully, in the fresh and exact words of poet Grace Paley: one of the things that art is about, for me, is justice. Now, that isn't a matter of opinion, really. That isn't to say, "I'm going to show these people right or wrong" or whatever. But what art is about-and this is what justice is about, although you'll have your own interpretations-is the illumination of what isn't known, the lighting up of what is under a rock, of what has been hidden. And I think people feel like that who are beginning to write. I was just speaking to somebody who's a native American, who was saying that what he's doing is picking up this rock at the mouth of a cave, out there in the desert, picking it up and saying, "I've got to light this up, and add what I find to the weight and life of human experience." That's what justice is about, and that's what art is about, that kind ofjustice and that kind of experience. (169) Beauty and justice, I would suggest, are acts of love. As such, they are dependent not only on human action but also on human thought-in order for love to be, there must be lovers and also a theoretical elaboration of the significance of love. By comparison, human rights must be attached to a defmition of the human. Love can be in as many forms as there are lovers,

294

Giovanna Covi

Morrison pragmatically reminds us. And here, in "Entropy," is Pynchon's hilarious rendering of the further difficulty at stake: No, ace, it is not a barrier. If it is anything it's a kind of leakage. Tell a girl: "I love you." No trouble with two-thirds of that, it's a closed circuit. Just you and she. But that nasty four-letter word in the middle, that's the one you have to look out for. Ambiguity. Redundance. Irrelevance, even. Leakage. All this is noise. Noise screws up your signal, makes for disorganization in the circuit. (91) "I love you" is a perfect example of the permeability ("leakage") and distorted ("noise") relation between words and things; the question is whether the utterance is a speech act that produces reality and, most importantly, whether it produces, if not the same reality, at least a single type of reality or any type of reality. In other words, is "I love you" a speech act or rather the demonstration that speech acts are an idea to be abandoned, as J. L. Austin himself suggested after proposing the category? (Sedgwick 67). Sedgwick's Touching Feeling provides a thorough discussion of the performative, which revises Butler's definition to account for specialized meaning and considers the paradoxical (deconstructive and theatrical) nature of performance. Her temporal-spatial query appreciably foregrounds, for example, how Victorian marriage and the institution of chattel slavery are yoked together (78-90), by showing how the performative act of purchasing a wife through marriage and the performative act of purchasing a slave at the market belong to the same class of utterances she names of "the periperformative" (4)---a class whose "complex efficacy depends on their tangent to, as well as their difference from the explicit performatives" (5). I want to consider the phrase "I love you" as a single composite of such paradoxical complexity, as if the aberrant tangentiality between marriage and slavery were contained in the single word love. 1 suggest that the phrase "I love you" is a periperformative utterance in itself. If the speech act "I do" results in marriage, by law, then the phrase "I love you," on the contrary, may be said to act in the Agambenian state of exception, without the law. Both theatrical and deconstructive, "I love you" may yield to situated, contingent and temporary embodiments of love ranging across the multiple opposite poles of its possible definitions, from life to death, affection to hatred, emotional to physical attachment, and so on. Love is only "leakage" and "noise"-the link between the 1 and the You. Morrison recommends that both the 1 and the You must be agents, lovers; otherwise, "the loved one" becomes "neutralized." If Dante in the Inferno makes

La Dividua-A Gendered Figuration for a Planetary Humanism

295

Francesca declare that no one who receives love can avoid loving, "Amor, ch' a nullo amato amar perdona, Imi prese del costui piacer si forte, /che, come vedi, ancor non m 'abbandona" (V Canto), Morrison in the inferno of Pecola's world can no longer rely on the love of liberation theologythe love that produces love just by loving, that reassures good people that they are reproducing themselves and that their goodness is contagious, that is defined metaphysically. But I and You must love and define their love in order for love to be. Both I and You must be dividue because nobody alone can be an agent. Picture a world inhabited by dividue wherein a more widely participatory democracy practices conversation-the shared pragmatic and theoretical activity that produces both subjectivity and community-as the scene of the address within which one can speak oneself and is always established by another (Butler, "Giving" 21). I want to propose a scene in which the speaker is stimulated by multiple addresses, in which giving an account of oneself, to paraphrase Butler, recalls the movements of a juggler rather than the stroke of a tennis player. I want to conceive this scene as a figuration: Haraway regards a figuration neither as a representation nor as a didactic illustration, but rather as a chimerical vision, an invitation to inhabit the corporeal story told in its lineaments, a series of "material-semiotic nodes or knots ... where the biological and the literary or artistic come together" (Haraway, When Species 4). From my everyday experience and from my feminist gaze I draw the need to make the plurality of my lived pressure explicit-a woman is never only a woman but always a woman and... ; likewise, feminism is always in the plural and always concerned with gender and its others. A multivocal conversation, with its unstructured flowing of unexpected turns provides a more complex forum for letting all dividue speak. This unstructured structure of multiple addresses has been tested recently by the research group ReSisters in Conversation. ll Joan Anim-Addo, Liana Borghi, Giovanna Covi, Luz Gomez Garcia, Sara Goodman, Sabine Grenz, and Mina Karavanta-seven researchers from seven universities, trained in six disciplinary areas, representing six nationalities, fluent in seven to ten languages--collectively inquire into issues of race, migration, and interculturality, focus on representations of diversity and complex relationships, and thrive on intense debate over the problems of responsibility and pedagogy. The first publication collecting the results of their inquiry is framed as a multi-vocal conversation which resists separating questions from answers and that invites readers to join and transform their travelling text, best represented by the multi-colored and changing figure of the fractal. It is this group of women that first brought

296

Giovanna Covi

me to propose the figuration of fa dividua and to insist on conversation as a (non)structuring method. Feminism depends on the ability of women to relate to other women, not on the correctness of its word. To state it as a slogan: feminism is not a conversion; it is a conversation-an open conversation. 14 La dividua, too, is always in the making; her project never fulfilled. She inhabits a complex web of relations that modifY her as much as she modifies them, and she speaks the language of cultural translation, never abandoning critical thinking. Representation of and for fa dividua entails resignification, confronting democracy as a dissonant, infmite process that can be carried on only through the tensions of translation, 15 risking what is known and the categories within which knowledge is being produced. 16 As she represents herself, fa dividua challenges representation itself, since she is not looking for the true image of herself, or for collapsing identification into identity; rather, she is open to forming a community that does not shy away from dissonant, oppositional voices. In this spirit, the women who have engaged the conversation which has birthed fa dividua have called themselves ReSisters, underlining their wish to operate beyond and beside "the mere tolerance of difference" that is "a total denial of the creative function of difference" (Lorde III). In this spirit also, I have taken on the responsibility of publishing, translating, and promoting loan Anim-Addo's Imoinda, a text which rewrites Aphra Behn's 1688 British story of an African slave, Oroonoko, from the point of view of the female slave. African-Caribbean writer Anim-Addo has written Imoinda as a resignification of Behn's novel in the form of the Italian opera, a creolization of the original text which is meant to sing and celebrate the fact that Imoinda survived her tragedy and gave birth to a daughter, to women of the African Diaspora who break the silence. I immediately felt interpellated by this text that creolizes my Italian culture in order to resignifY Caribbean history, and so I took Anim-Addo's story as a generous invitation to begin a conversation in which as critic and translator. I participated with my own specific difference in the process of resignification, one that enables the cultural life and the history-making of dispersed populations, for themselves and ourselves alike albeit without pretending to homogenize the experiences ("we are in the same boat, but we came on different ships," as lessie lackson's memorable statement goes) of the "discomfort zone,,17 to which the people of the African Diaspora have been confined, in Europe and in the Americas. The sharing is meant to invoke "the contact zone" of a figuration in which "diverse bodies and meanings coshape one another" (Haraway, When Species 4).

La Dividua-A Gendered Figuration for a Planetary Humanism

297

La dividua's negotiative nature situates her at the junction between acting and being acted upon. Avital Ronell observes that "in the twentieth century, a subtle shift occurred in the terms in which we locate the ethics and values of responsibility" and shows that Hannah Arendt has inaugurated a "movement away from the concept of the citizen and towards the refugee as the figure that carries the demand for clear ethical responsiveness" (20). This observation is contained in a powerful essay lamenting that nowadays the poetic word has remained largely "without recognizable address." Ronell declares that "theory without poetry" is a "misery" and observes, moreover, that "as symptom, the aberrant dissociation of poetry from theory reflects an increasing technicization, not to say impoverishment, of critical language" (17).18 In her reading of Heidegger's reading of Holderlin's poem "Andenken," Ronell offers a provocative analysis of the "intricate" encounter between poetry and thought, focusing on a moment in the text when the poet and the thinker greet each other. She observes that the Greeting "exposes them to time, history and being" (18), which is what Heidegger's reading fails to confront. She investigates the Greeting-the relation between poetry and history-as that which offers "a trace of a relation to an ungraspable alterity" (18). In doing so, she historicizes Heidegger's reading in 1941, a time when the philosopher was suspected of relations with National Socialism. She notes that poet and thinker never "experience fusion" (19) and Holderlin's poet becomes a figure of the Different. She then turns to seek the figure of alterity within Holderlin's poem, accounting for Arendt's observation that the question of love is raised "in the milieu of the stranger": although the alien calls for love, "we hesitate to love the stranger" (20). The poem is about remembrance but looks into the future precisely because remembering requires another kind of thinking (Andenken as anders Denken), and Ronell observes that the Greeting is a sort of reciprocal promise: "the other is given leave to be what it, she, he is" (22). The Greeting, Ronell argues, reaches into a domain in which truth and poesie are no longer distinguishable; it is given like a gift and as such it is a sign of a Derridean politics of friendship, an exchange which is nomeciprocal. To demonstrate this, she dwells on the sudden apparition in the poem of the dark-skinned women, about which Heidegger asks, "Und Warum die Frauen?" These unruly brown women disrupt the frame of remembering, and Heidegger "locks them into a schema of subjectivity" (29). Ronell deftly points out that philosophy has needed to domesticate the other for its own philosophizing, but poetry "stays in the rift" (30), and Holderlin's poem moves on to its only question, "But where are my friends?" In other words, poetry lets otherness be and keeps the question

298

Giovanna Covi

alive underlining the value of conversation that can never be coerced or compelled. As such, conversation is a gift, which the poet asks for in his quest for friends. The questioning and precarious character of the Greeting, a trope for the poetic word, seeks communication with the transient and foregrounds that there cannot be a place within which to secure the retrieval of memory. With this analysis, Ronell invites contemporary scholars concerned with the pursuit of social justice and the establishment of community to let poetry be-i.e., to liberate the brown women from the category of the Different. The humanities can reach for human rights through conversational theory that does not consider poetry a luxury. Like Penelope, Ie dividue (universal feminine, plural noun, of foreign origin) weave endless conversations-they temporally put one thread after another and spatially line one yam beside another to interlace the planetary human spanning from the poetic sky to the philosophic abyss.

Notes 1 William V. Spanos, inspring mentor and tenacious organic intellectual, has influenced my appreciation of Heidegger's philosophy. 2 The declaration is offered by the poet Vicky Hearne, as quoted in Ronell (17). 3 See hooks, Feminist Theory (1984) and Feminism is for Everybo0' (2000). 4 See This Bridge Called My Back (1983); especially "Theory in the Flesh." 5 I have argued for this friendly relation between theories developed in the different but comparable socio-historical contexts of Chicana and Caribbean cultures in my contribution to Caribbean Scollish Relations. Also, see Glissant, 1989. 6 See Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Mina Karavanta expresses a similar emphasis to that stressed by Spivak through the concept "planetarity" in "Globalization and Its Appatuses," where she observes: "The word 'globe' represents the world in its most spatial and visible terms and reduces its potential to denote kosmos (the experience of being in the world) to sphere, a synonym of the word 'globe' that signifies a roundabout gesture of turning the world into a self-encircled system, into a picture, namely, into a terrain that can be visualized, traveled, marketed, administered and controlled at the click of a bulton" (36). 7 See Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera for a discussion of region and identity. 8 The subtitle of my Jamaica Kincaid's Prismatic Subjects: Making Sense ofBeing in the World is meant to emphasize precisely the dialogical relationship I wish to establish with the object of my reading. In this study, I articulate the concept prismatic subject, derived from an image in Kincaid's At The Bottom ofthe River,

La Dividua-A Gendered Figuration for a Planetary Humanism

299

to center feminist theory on a subjectivity that is relational, temporary, and poetic. The proposal of la dividua as a working figuration for fostering democratic humanism and human rights activism is strictly related to the prismatic subject. 9 See Boccaccio's Filocolo, Book V, Chapter 56. 10 See Irigaray's discussion on "When Our Lips Speak Together" in This Sex 11 I am referring to Donna Haraway's construction, "natureculture." 12 The collection Figure della complessita provides a pioneering study of the fractal as a figuration of feminist identity in multidisciplinary contexts. 13 ReSisters in Conversation is part of the Research Group Travelling Concepts, in the Advanced European Thematic Network Athena, devoted to the development of European perspectives in feminist pedagogy in the field of Women's Studies and Gender research. 14 Elaine Scarry (2003) in Who Defended the Country? argues that democracy is more effective as self-governing, rather than as a self-defensive militia. She analyzes what happened on American Flight 77 vs. United Flight 93 during the altack on 9/11 and convincingly shows that the passengers who exercised authority over their own lives through conversations with their relatives and among themselves offered a more efficient model for fighting the war on terror. They were the only ones who reacted on time to the terrorist attack, and they were effective in their use of cellular phones, their conversations with relatives. Conversation thus is a useful practice not only for resistance networking but also for mainstreaming strategy, an empowering practice for individuals and societies. 15 In "Europe Becomes Blacker" the Jamaican poet Michelle Cliff considers the historical presence of Blackness in Europe with a strikingly critical eye. The poem opens by introducing a Europe which "was always dark," because whites have always been and still are "in mad pursuit / Of Blackness"; it considers "the extent of the Blackness of Europe" in modern times in words from the Italian and German Nazi-fascist racism that Cliff refuses to translate into English: Which brings me to the children of mixturedie Mischlingen bambini di sangue misto the crossover babies. There are millions of us. We number in the millions. Europe has not been Schwarzenrein For a long time now And I don't just mean the Black cardinal Entombed in the Vatican during the Cinquecento ... All those gypsies shoveled into ovens Now they were dark people too. I find these lines a compelling example of translation tbat shows its limits in order to draw attention to the contextual meaning of words and resist the risk of playing with mere signifiers, as I argue in my contribution to I Am Black/WhitelYellow in which I analyze Italian racism and the problem of translating racisms. Cliff forces us to see the original through the translation, and to be there-in "the discomfort zone"-ourselves.

300

Giovanna Covi

See Butler, Undoing Gender p. 223-27 17 Joan Anim-Addo is the only black scholar in Athena, a feminist network which gathers over 120 academic institutions in Europe: she often uses this phrase to remind us that privileges are not shared and she is confined to the "discomfort 16

zone."

18 I fully share Ronell's political concern about the segregation of theory from poetry, so much so that in 1985 I conducted a conversation, published in the journal boundary 2, among theorists and poets, prominent among them Robert Creeley and William Spanos, to investigate the reasons for the tendency to divide words into two types (Covi, 1985); in my own critical work I consistently struggle to contaminate the words of philosophers with those of poets to show that they can participate in a shared discourse; I have especially theorized this method of inquiry in COy; 1998 and Covi 2003.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. Problems of Moral Philosophy. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Agamben, Giorgio. Stato di eccezione. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003. Alighieri, Dante. 1314. L'Inferno. Anim-Addo, loan. Imoinda, or She Who Will Lose Her Name. Trans. and Ed. Giovanna Covi. Voci femminili caraibiche e interculturalita. Trento: Dipartimento di Scienze Filologiche e Storiche, 2003. Anim-Addo, loan and Suzanne Scafe, eds. I Am Black/White/Yellow: An Introduction to the Black Body in Europe. London: Mango Publishing, 2007. Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute: San Francisco, 1987. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Filocolo. 1339. Borghi, Liana, and Clotilde Barbarulli, eds. Figure della complessita. Cagliari: CUEC, 2004. Butler, ludith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004. -. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. - . Afterword. The Humanities in Human Rights: Critique, Language, Politics. PMLA, 121:5 (October 2006): 1658-1661. - . GiVing an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Butler, ludith and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation State? London: Seagull Books, 2007.

La Dividua-A Gendered Figuration for a Planetary Humanism

301

Cacciari, Massimo. "L'invenzione dell'individuo." Micromega, Almanacco difilosofia, n. 11. (1996): 121-27. Carter, Angela. "Notes on the Frontline." On Gender and Writing. Ed. Michelene Wandor. London: Pandora, 1983.69-77. Cavarero, Adriana. Corpo in figure. Filosofia e politica della corporeita. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1995. -. Tu che mi guardi tu che mi racconti. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1997. -. Orrorismo: ovvero della violenza sull'inerme. Milano: Feltrinelli, 2007. Cliff, Michelle. "Europe Becomes Blacker." The Land of Look Behind. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1985. Coomaraswamy, Radhika.Integration of the Human Rights of Women and the Gender Perspective: Violence Against Women. United Nations Commission on Human Rights. 58 th sess. II Mar. 2002. E/CNA/2002/83/Add.3. http://www.womenwarpeace.org. 14luly 2006. Cornell, Drucilla The Philosophy of the Limit. New York: Routledge, 1992. Covi, Giovanna. "Words of Poetry, Words of Theory: At Breakfast with Don Byrd, Robert Creeley, Douglas Dunn, ludith lohnson, Charles Stein and William Spanos." boundary 2, 15.3/16.1 (Spring/Fall 1998): 73-96. - . "Decolonialized Feminist Subjects." Critical Studies on the Feminist Subject. Trento: Dipartimento di Scienze Filologiche e Storiche, Universita di Trento, 1998. -. Jamaica Kincaid's Prismatic Subjects: Making Sense of Being in the World. London: Mango Publishing, 2003. Covi, Giovanna (ed.). Voci femminili caraibiche e interculturalita. Trento: Dipartimento di Scienze Filologiche e Storiche, 2003. Covi, Giovanna (ed.), loan Anim-Addo, Liana Borghi, Luz Gomez Garcia, Sara Goodman, Sabine Grenz, and Mina Karavanta. ReSisters in Conversation: Representation Responsibility Complexity Pedagogy. York: Raw Nerve, 2006. Covi, Giovanna (ed.), Joan Anim-Addo, Velma Pollard, and Carla Sassi. Caribbean Scottish Relations. London: Mango Publishing, 2007. Derrida, Jacques. "Differance." Margins ofPhilosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982. - . "This Strange Institution Called Literature." Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge, New York: Routledge, 1992. -. Politics ofFriendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso, 1997.

302

Giovanna Covi

"The Almost Nothing of the Unpresentable" Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Points.. .Jnterviews 1974-1994. Ed. Elizabeth Weber. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. 78-88. -. Of Hospitality. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Elam, Diane. Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. En Abyme. New York: Routledge, 1994. Franco, Jean. "Rape and Human Rights." PMLA, 121.5 (October 2006): 1662-64. Gandhi, Leela. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-deSiecle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. Glissant, Edouard. "Cross-Cultural Poetics" and "A Caribbean Future." Caribbean Discourse. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989.97-158 and 221-256. Haraway, Donna. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World ofModern Science. New York: Routledge, 1989. -. Simians, Cyborg and Women: The Reinvention ofNature. New York: Routledge, 1991. -. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickling Paradigm, 2003 -. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Heidegger, Martin. "The Origin of the Work of Art." Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper, 1971. hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press, 1984. -. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representation. New York: Routledge, 1994. - . Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. Cambridge: South End Press, 2000. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. 1977. Trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. - . Etique de la difference sexllelle. Paris: Minuit, 1985. Karavanta, Assimina. "Globalization and Its Apparatuses: Reducing the World to a Globe". The Periphery Viewing the World. Eds. Christina Dokou, Efterpi Mitsi & Bessie Mitsikopoulou. Athens: Parousia, 2004. 35-42. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Aunt Lute: San Francisco, 1984. 36-8.

La Dividua-A Gendered Figuration for a Planetary Humanism

303

Moraga, Cherrie, and Gloria Anzaldua, eds. "Theory in the Flesh." This Bridge Called my Back. New York: Kitchen Table, 1983. Morrison, Toni. 1970 The Bluest Eye. New York: Plume, 1994. Okin, Susan Moller. Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Paley, Grace. "Of Poetry and Women and the World (1986)." Just as I Thought. London: Virago, 1998: 167-73. Pulcini, Elena. II potere di unire: Femminile, desiderio, cura. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003. Pynchon, Thomas. "Entropy." Kenyon Review 22.2 (Spring 1960): 27-92. Ronell, Avilal. "On the Misery of Theory without Poetry: Heidegger's Reading ofHolderlin's 'Andenken'." PMLA 120: I, 2005: 16-32. Said, Edward. 1982. "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community." Reflections on Exile. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,2002: 118-147. -. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus, 1993. - . 1995. "History, Literature, and Geography." Reflections on Exile. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002: 453-73. -. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Palgrave, 2004. Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. - . Who defended the country? A New Democracy Forum on Authoritarian versus Democratic Approaches to National Defence on 9/11. New York: Beacon Press, 2003. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Spivak, Gayatri C. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. -. Death ofa Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Taylor, Steven. "Beauty Trouble" in Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action. Eds. Anne Waldman and Lisa Birman. St. Paul: Coffee House Press, 2004. 381-92.

Said, Derrida and the Undecidable Human: In the Name of Inhabitancy 305

CHAPTER TWELVE SAID, DERRIDA AND THE UNDECIDABLE HUMAN: IN THE NAME OF INHABITANCY ROBERT p, MARZEC

[Tjhere is no guarantee [in the act of interpretation], only a deep subjective sense for which no substitute, no guidebook or authoritative source is possible. One must make the decision oneself and take responsibility for it [...]. It is the avoidance of this process of taking final comradely responsibility for one's reading that explains, I think, a crippling limitation in those varieties of deconstructive Derridean readings that end (as they began) in undecidability and uncertainty. To reveal the wavering and vacillation in all writing is useful up to a point, just as it may here and there be useful to show, with Foucault, that knowledge in the end serves power. But both altematives defer for too long a declaration that the actuality of reading is, fundamentally, an act of perhaps modest human emancipation and enlightenment that changes and enhances one's knowledge for purposes other than reductiveness, cynicism, or fiuitless standing aside....[A]s citizens we enter into the text with responsibility and scrupulous care. Otherwise, why bother at all? -Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism No responsibility is taken if at a given moment one could not decide without knowing, without

knowledge, theoretical reflection, the determinate inquiry having encountered its limit or its suspension, its interruption. Without this interruption...there would never be a decision or responsibility, but only the deployment consequent to a determinate knowledge, the imperturbable application of rules, of rules known or knowable, the deployment of a program with full knowledge of the facts. For there to be decision and responsibility, I am not saying that one needs ignorance or some form of not-knowing; not at all, on the contrary, one needs to know and one needs to know as much as possible and as well as possible, but between one's knowledge and the decision, the chain of consequence must be interrupted. One must, in some way, arrive at a point at which one does not know what to decide for the decision to be made. Thus a certain undecidability, contrary to what one says and often pretends to think, the undecidability-this one, in any case-is the condition or the opening of a space for an ethical or political decision, and not the opposite.... There can be ethics and politics only where a decision or an action is inescapable [...j. One should not have to negotiate between two negotiables. One must negotiate the nonnegotiable [...]. Negotiation is always negotiation of the nonnegotiable [... J. If there must be prescription, if there must be duty in the face of something such as the rights of man, then it demands that all of this be rethought constantly: and to rethink, to question this, one must begin from a place where man is not, where there is not man, where one does not know what it is. -Jacques Derrida, "Ethics and Politics Today" Located within the struggle that Said and Derrida separately wage over the issue of undecidability, we find each thinker's delineation of an ethical conceptualization of the human. For both, this struggle is the key to an understanding of responsibility; moreover, it expresses an urgency to enact an ethics in a geopolitical world that makes the very thought of an ethical human subjectivity practically impossible. For Derrida there is no ethics

306

Robert P. Marzec

without undecidability; for Said there is no ethics with undecidability. Their positions are non-negotiable. In Said's case, however, an additional factor must be added to the equation of the human: land relations. The conjunction of the human with this additional factor reveals what I argue in this essay to be the major difference between Said and Derrida in their engagement with the notion of human subjectivity: it is not necessary "undecidability" per se, but the relation of undecidability to the phenomenon of land or geography that separates these two thinkers. Said reads geography as indispensable in any ethical struggle for human subjectivity; whereas Derrida holds that it is the politics of "soil" that destroys the potential for the human to be ethical. This split, I here suggest, has plagued theory not only from its "beginning" (that is, from its initial inclusion in the Western canon of cultural, historical, and literary criticism in the 1960s and 1970s, a "beginning" attributed to Derrida's critique of Western metaphysics in the 1967 publications of Writing and Difference, Of Grammato!ogy, and Speech and Phenomena); it also forms the very ground of the specific idea of "theory" (the "Iinguisticl deconstructive tum") that defines poststructuralist thought in the West. This split thus determines-in advance-the specific manner in which one can demand the right to be human. Before turning to a discussion of geography, let us first examine the argument over the issue of undecidability as articulated in the above passages. What one discovers immediately is that there is little difference between Derrida and Said on this issue. The "act of deciding" for Said is precisely the ethical encounter with the undecidable as presented by Derrida. The "deep subjective sense" invoked by Said, despite the untheorized nature of this seemingly modernist idea of consciousness, is not an essentialism but acquires its meaning only in relation to its reaction against already-written, pre-existing "guidebooks" and "authoritative sources." "Deep subjectivity" therefore signifies a leap into the realm of the undecidable or, more appropriately, a leap away from what has been decided. In this leap the responsible subject is born. The responsible subject is therefore the subject that decides, from the (non)space of undecidability or, to refer to the passage from Derrida, from the space of the yet-to-be-negotiated. Any other form of deciding is tantamount to the subject abrogating the decision to another subject or to a system already in being. Both, therefore, to again use Derrida's language, defme responsibility through an act of deciding that breaks "the chain of consequence." Having said this, we must also mark two features of these passages. Firstly, Said's encouragement to "take responsibility" by acting, despite its

Said, Derrida and the Undecidable Human: In the Name of Inhabitancy 307 magnitude, also remains untheorized. This is characteristic of Said's concern in the latter half of his career to speak to as broad an audience as possible by dispensing with "high theoretical language." At a historical moment when the official line in too many quarters of intellectual inquiry is to denounce theory, an untheorized "speaking to a broad audience" nevertheless runs the risk of lapsing into a reified and counter-productive methodology. One should always be suspicious of consensus, even critical consensus. Said would be the first to warn us of that salient fact. Despite these limitations, Said's "broad" language offers more than enough for consideration. Secondly, these seemingly routine phrases-"the chain of consequence" and "speaking to a broad audience"-carry with them a considerable burden: the former is a metaphor that suggests the historical albatross that hangs over any existing context; it speaks of the past and present state of affairs, of consensus and the work of "democratic governments," of "lived experience" and its limitations, of legalized national and international "universal" communities. The latter names or calls for an encounter with geography and indicates a gathering-to-come, an audience that needs to be made-beyond the borders of any existing social order. These two features-history and geography-force a significant provocation on any scholar seeking to produce something more than the existing political state of affairs. The two form the essence of Said's sense of responsibility; their coupling provokes an encounter with the ethical, and the ethical is spatial and geographical for Said, temporal and linguistic for Derrida. This fundamental difference between the two thinkers raises several questions. Are all decisions that face the nonnegotiable ethical decisions? Or, put differently, do all decisions break the chain of consequence? These and similar questions unfold in different directions, depending on whether or not one speaks "linguistically" or "geopolitically." Consider the following colonial moment from E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, an example I choose here for its enactment of an exemplary characterization of our contemporary neocolonial occasion. This particular moment in the novel is significant for it represents one of the last acts of colonizing "unknown," "virgin" territory. In the passage the great explorer Peary is on the verge of conquering the North Pole for the United States: At midmorning of April 9, Peary called a halt. He ordered Henson to build a snow shield protect him while he took his observations. Peary lay on his stomach and with a pan of mercury and a sextant, some paper and a pencil, he calculated his position. It did not satisfy him. He walked further along the floe and took another sighting. This did not satisfy him. All day long Peary shuffled back and forth over the ice, a mile one way, two miles

308

Robert P. Marzec

another, and made his observations. No one observation satisfied him. He would walk a few steps due north and find himself going due south. On this watel)' planet the sliding sea refused to be fixed. He couldn't find the exact place to say this spot, here, is the North Pole. Nevertheless there was no question that they were there. All the observations together indicated that. Give three cheers, my boy, he told Henson. And let's fly the flag. Henson and the Esquimos cheered loudly but could not be heard in the howling wind. The flag snapped and rippled. Peal)' posed Henson and the Esquimos in front of the flag and took their picture. It shows five stubby figures wrapped in furs, the flag set in a paleocl)'stic peak behind them that might suggest a real physical Pole. Because of the light the faces are indistinguishable, seen only as black blanks framed by caribou fur. (65-66) Here, Doctorow offers a concise articulation of the more general dynamic defining the primary struggle of our neocolonial, geopolitical era: Peary's decision to "fly the flag" in the face of the undecidability of the "unfixable" planet emerges as the fundamental ontology of the colonial encounter. It is a clear act of deciding in the face of undecidability. Peary arbitrarily plants the American flag in the midst of an ever-shifting instability. The impossibility of deciding is even reflected in the aborted attempt to represent the event: the signifying image distinguishes nothing. The reached goal only comes to presence as a "suggestion" of "a real physical Pole." In the lead up to this moment, Peary has ploughed his way through the Eskimo habitat, largely ignoring the Eskimos' existence and the distinctiveness of their culture. The Eskimos have little to offer Peary, only their services for the greater good of exploration. They are represented by the exploratory team's historian-the character of Father-as "childish" and as terror-stricken by their own geographical location. In fact, and more significantly for the "pre-emptive" violence that now defines United States nationalism post-9/1l, the universe of the North Pole itself would have driven the explorers insane (as the unexplored space of "Africa" purportedly drove Conrad's Kurtz insane) if it were not for the protective barrier of what the novel refers to as Peary's "system"-a prenegotiated and fully-decided linguistic chain of reference that the explorers carry with them on their way to the Pole: After numbers of expeditions, Peal)' had developed a system. EveI)' last detail of their lives in the Arctic represented his considered judgment and was part of the system.... Peal)' loved to discuss his system....ln the deepest part of the winter of continuous night, when terrible storms tore rocks from the cliffs, and winds shrieked, and it was so desolately cold...Peal)' and most of the men withdrew to the theoretical considerations of his system and so protected themselves against their fear. The Esquimos, who had no system but merely lived here, suffered the terrors of their universe.

Said, Derrida and the Undecidable Human: [n the Name of [nhabitancy 309 [Peary's system] proposed that human beings... warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through. (62-63)

This moment in the narrative culminates in one of the most important insights made by an American novelist. Peary's mission, essentially, is to enclose the North Pole, to map its precise location, and claim it for his nation. In no way can it be said that he and his men inhabit the landscape they superficially pass through. This is represented in not only the astonishing trivialization of the Eskimos that actually do inhabit that space (they are "driven mad" by their own land), but most tellingly in Doctorow's description of the pattern of thought that governs everything the explorers see and do, a way of thinking that "warrants times and places ... [for beings] other than the time and place they actually live through." This single sentence, what amounts to a major ontological insight on the part of Doctorow, describes like no other the orientation of the neoimperial subject of contemporaneity. This is the subject of Empire par excellence: the totally disinterested human being productively colonizing land by not being there. It is a subject that has no concept of Geography (of other geographies) and speaks and acts from the historical system that holds dominion over the fully-globalized world. In order to counter the colonial act of territorializing, it is not enough to insist on the distinction between decidability and undecidability. Every decision-even from the space of the known-brushes up against the undecidable, but not every decision takes responsibility in an ethical fashion. Capitalism, with its insistence on discovering and exploiting the New, offers us examples of irresponsible deciding everyday. In the current postcolonial occasion, an encounter with the "ethical" thus demands a new conceptualisation of "theory"-beyond the split between linguistics and geography that marks the inauguration of theory as we know it. To properly think the ethical, one must consider not only the discursive chain of consequences (logocentrism, anthropocentrism, etc.) but the widespread erasure of the planet's various formerly existing geographies and the consequent prevention of geographies-to-come that is the legacy of the colonial era. What if by "ethics" one meant a concern and care for the singularity of inhabitants, habitations, and habitations yet to be? This ethics, a properly transfiguring encounter with a habitation irreducible to the presiding neocolonial order-one that consequently changes the imposed coordinates operative in that order-effectively touches, to use the popular Lacanian terminology, the Real excluded from Derrida's ethics and politics of undecidability. To draw merely one contemporary parallel, but one I see to be

310

Robert P. Marzec

symptomatic of neocolonial activity, both in the fonn of the movement of late capital, but also the movement of the contemporary nation-state: in his ontological critique of Peary's journey to one of the last unenclosed spaces of the planet-a critique that foregrounds both the linguistic and the geographical-Doctorow proleptically anticipates the Bush administration's planting of an American presence and political authority in Iraq. As with the "watery surface" of the North Pole, the space of Iraq , refuses to be domesticated by the "system" (in the full sense of that word as developed by Doctorow in relation to Peary) of American neoimperialism. The political administration carries a system on its back, and as such, plows through Iraq in order to plant the flag of Halliburtonan act of territorialization that erases geography. I In its hasty acceptance of a certain understanding of ontology/ontopology Derrida's "undecidability" ultimately rejects and thus neglects to develop this connection between the ethical and the geographical. Consequently "undecidability,"-free-floating, metaphysically "standing-above"-forecloses the central or inherent antagonism of postcolonial social production: the "abject" of dislocated inhabitants that are the outcome of the long and brutal history of colonial land relations that have infonned and now define the presence of "humanity" in the contemporary arena of international relations. This decision to neglect land relations consequently influenced the institutionalization of "deconstruction" in the academy. Turned into a methodology, deconstruction attended considerably to the discursive orders of the tradition but failed to articulate a response to the demands put upon those that historically have had little access to citizenry and cultural production: the dispossessed, exiled, homeless, "paperless" peoples of the planet. This is not to reject Derrida's engagement with undecidability wholesale, nor to lessen the vital part it plays in any attempt to theorize the conjunctions of the ethical and the human. Nevertheless despite certain moments (one of which I will address momentarily) his critical inquiry has consistently shied away from the colonial encounter in tenns of the specific relation between humankind and the land. Derrida's extensive work on the human and its relation to undecidability does not fully consider the impact that colonial policiesparticularly in the fonn of land refonnations-have had on inhabitation.2 For these reasons, and because of the continuing importance of deconstruction, I want to consider the one text of Derrida's that comes closest to an engagement with geography, Specters ofMarx. Because of its close proximity to the issue of land relations-no doubt due in part to Marx's concern for them-this text reveals something important about Derrida's decision not to articulate a philosophy of geography (which tells

Said, Derrida and the Undecidable Human: In the Name oflnhabitancy 311

us something as well about the lack of geographical considerations in our Derridian influenced poststructuralist world in general). In Specters of Marx, Derrida names what he refers to as "the plagues of 'the new world order"': I) "unemployment," 2) "the exclusion of the homeless" from participation in democratic life, 3) the world "economic war" (between the European Community, Eastern Europe, the United States, and Japan), 4) "the inability to master the contradictions" of the free market, 5) "the aggravation of foreign debt," 6) "the anns industry and trade," 7) the spread of "nuclear weapons," 8) "inter-ethnic wars," 9) the "phantomStates that are the mafia and drug cartels," and 10) "international law and its institutions" (81-83). It is significant for my argument here, that in this list only in number 8 does land make an appearance on the stage of Derrida's exemplary deconstructive critique of a world that has turned away from any and every alternative to capitalism. But again, symptomatic of the entire history of "deconstruction"-a history that "began" with Derrida, which involves an expansion (and then overthrow) of a certain Heideggerian destruction of Western metaphysics-the land by definition comes to presence in the historical era of deconstruction (a historical continuum that extends from post-1966 to this day) as the last remnant of metaphysics: as "blood-and-soil" politics and as little else. 3 The essentialist (and teIlingly wholesale) characterization of land is indicative of the problematic of deconstruction itself. This sanctioned monopresentation of land in the discursive realm curiously continues to have widespread acceptance in the intellectual community. This is more than curious, especially when we consider the fact that the poststructuralist community has come to understand that all linguistic regimes found themselves on a fundamental exclusion, on a refusal to think what the logic of a field by definition must not think in order to found and promote its movement. One is tempted to refer to geography here as the obscured other that haunts the philosophies of deconstruction and postrnodernity in general. Let us closely consider Derrida's representation of the eighth "plague": Inter-ethnic wars (have there ever been another kind?) are proliferating, driven by an archaic phantasm and concept, by a primitive conceptual phantasm of community, the nation-State, sovereignty, borders, native soil and blood. Archaism is not a bad thing in itself, it doubtless keeps some irreducible resource. But how can one deny that this conceptual phantasm is, so to speak, made more outdated than ever, in the very ontopology it supposes, by tele-technic dis-location? (By ontopology we mean an axiomatics linking indissociably to the ontological value of present-being [on] to its sitl/a/ion, to the stable and presentable determination of a

312

Robert P. Marzec

locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in general). For having spread in an unheard-of fashion, which is more and more differentiated and more and more accelerated (it is acceleration itself, beyond the norms of speed that have until now informed human culture), the process of dislocation is no less arch-originary, that is, just as "archaic" as the archaism that it has always dislodged. This process is, moreover, the positive condition of the stabilization that it constantly relaunches. All stability in a place being but a stabilization or sedentarization, it will have to have been necessary that the local differance, the spacing of a displacement gives the movement its start. And gives place and gives rise [donne lieu]. All national rootedness, for example, is rooted first of all in the memory or the anxiety of a displaced---{)r displaceable-population. (82-83)

Without a doubt, Derrida's description of ethnic land relations represents the very form of geopolitics that has come to dominate current global relations. Such land relations are the violent metaphysics against which a liberatory ethics struggles. These metaphysical relations to the land indeed have a long history, the most notable "archaic" order being the Roman imperium that characterizes the earth as terra, as the space available for colonization, as opposed to the sea, which cannot be "settled" (here one would need to consider as fully as possible Heidegger's discussion of terra in his Parmenides lectures) (Heidegger 60). However, nowhere in this passage, or elsewhere in Specters ofMarx, do we see any other thought of land relations. We are to be satisfied with land's tacit (non)presentation in the form of the negative, of how not to relate to the land. This passage is a synecdoche for Derrida's standing relation to not only Heideggerian "ontology," but also "geography" in general (it is significant that these two are coupled under the name of "ontopology" by Derrida). It is also part and parcel of the work of deconstruction in general, which follows from Derrida, and which involves the typical move of establishing "deconstruction" as something radically different through the act of characterizing Heideggerian "earth" as the residual remainder of metaphysics. The "rootedness" criticized by Derrida above names the very relation of violence that enabled colonial regimes to establish their presence in distant lands: the economy of territorialization I have been criticizing here. The failure to think an alternative to land relations might be, I posit, a more useful marker for differently periodizing our present historical context. Within the framework of existing critical social relations, the geographical, no mailer how much it is deconstructed, nevertheless continues to be re-presented through the lens of the dominant historical world order. This framework thus continually produces, in the act of criticism itself, its own crippling "oversight" of land, a pronounced

Said, Derrida and the Undecidable Human: In the Name of Inhabitancy 313 negation of the being of land. This oversight neutralizes what would otherwise be an engagement with land as differance itself-as the nonfull, differing and deferring origin of differences in the existing geographical sphere-and obscures contemporary criticism's engagement with territoriality and the thought of land in general. When a philosopher who understands the ethical importance of these forces does not deconstruct his own constructions of geography, he inadvertently highlights the specter of our contemporary geopolitical world order. When the dominant geopolitical powers constitute their regimes through the predatory overseeing and authorizing of distant realms, an ethics that can conceptualize no alternative runs the risk of not being an ethics at all. Curiously, the more that Said moves away from the poststructuralism of theorists such as Derrida and Foucault, the more he moves toward a philosophy of the geographical. In a significant essay that has escaped the attention it deserves, entitled "History, Literature, Geography," Said finds such critical value in geography that he articulates it as a force that reveals the limitations of one of his most treasured twentieth-century thinkers, Erich Auerbach. Said maps out the limitations of Auerbach's focus on the correspondence between history and literature by countering it with the work of Antonio Gramsci. What Said frods in Gramsci (what he argues to be a troublesome lack in the works of Auerbach) is a "very powerful geographical sense" (458). Auerbach, Said argues, ultimately reconciles the tensions between history and literature-whereas Gramsci' s geographical apprehension is based on a "spatial sense of discontinuity," one that "renders far less effective than ever before the possibility of correspondence, congruence, continuity, and reconciliation between different areas of experience" (458). Gramsci thus produces a "certain type of critical consciousness" that differs from the temporal awareness that marks Auerbach and the legacy of Hegelian thinkers in general, because it is "geographical and spatial in its fundamental coordinates" (465). Gramsci's work thus has a "situational intensity" that the others lack. He is deeply aware that the world is made up of "ruler and ruled," a fact which Said himself never lets us forget at any moment throughout the highly geographically focused Culture and Imperialism. Through Gramsci, Said develops a specific notion of the geographical: not as a discursive construct, nor as a blood-and-soil politics, but as a profound index of uneven development. However, the most astonishing claim of this essay comes in Said's theorizing of this terminology, for he finds a value of such critical significance in these terms that they far outweigh the terminology of Auerbach and even that of thinkers like Lukacs. Moreover, Said argues

314

Robert P. Marzec

that without such a tenninology the critic runs the risk of producing at best an encyclopedia, at worst a totalizing system: most of Gramsci's terminology.. .is what I would call a critical and geographical rather than an encyclopedic or totalizing nominative or systematic terminology. The terms slide over rather than fix on what they talk about; they illuminate and make possible elaborations and connections, rather than holding down, reifying, fetishizing. Most of all, I think Gramsci is interested in using terms for thinking about society and culture as productive activities occurring territorially, rather than as repositories of goods, ideas, traditions, institutions to be incorporated as reconciled correspondences [...] The basic social contest for Gramsci is the one over hegemony, that is, the control of essentially heterogeneous, discontinuous, non-identical, and unequal geographies of human habitation and effort. (467) Here, Said comes very close to articulating a new theory of historiography based on a process of identifying an age through the way in which it relates to the land and constitutes the geography of the earth. His is an ethico-geopolitical philosophy, one to which I refer as the "Name of Inhabitancy." 4 If one were to attempt an initial definition of the ontology of our age, one might do worse than to characterize it in tenns of a war against inhabitancy, the war waged against Iraq being only the latest manifestation of a long list that, I hope, need not be enumerated here. The inhabitant, and inhabitation in general, is the specter that haunts all neoimperial orders of the late 20 th and early 21 st century world, for, in the "Name of the Inhabitant," one can locate the intersections of a non-positive, extradiscursive notion of the human, the irreducibility of undecidability, and the force of geography. The erasure of inhabitancy is intimately related to the long and complicated history of the enclosure movement, which began in England but transverses four centuries, from the 18 th to the 21 st, and is deep-seated in the history of three epistemological and socio-historico-political events, namely, that of the nation, coloniality, and globality. The enclosure movement, a complex and heterogeneous phenomenon impossible to fully articulate or explore within the confines of this essay, was significant in part due to its redefmition of "open" land or land held in common as "enclosed" land or individualized private property. The movement brought about the first wide-scale surveying, meticulous measurement, detailed mapping, precise naming, and imperial administration of land in the modern era in the West. One of many results was the sudden condition of being dispossessed of land by the more powerful who in their recoding of

Said, Derrida and the Undecidable Human: In the Name oflnhabitancy 315 land for the production of what came to be known during the enclosure movement as the "high yield"-the cultivation of land in such a fashion that it produce greater and greater surplus-simultaneously effected one way that England marked itself as superior to the European continent and to its expanding colonies. This is the logical economy of Robinson Crusoe's relation to land in Defoe's novel, "spreading God's providential table in the wilderness" of the uncultivated island so that the land produced a tangible yield for the British Empire (69). The second aspect of this movement involves the transfonnation of what it is to be human: the erasure of a fonn of human subjectivity known under the Name of Inhabitancy. We might redefine colonization at this point as the erasure of inhabitancy-the severing of an obligation between humankind and the land, between human subjects as born in and through a relation to an ecosystem. In light of this claim to redefinition, the precise manner of "obligation" needs to be theorized at length, and endlessly, if it is to be something other than the essentialist ontology of human-land connection that holds sway today. For now we can only say that humanity becomes defined more and more in tenns of its ability to stand over and against the land. Land, as Heidegger argued some fifty years ago, has become an entity for man's disposal, rather than an entity to be protected. Environmentalists would do well to think the full potential of Heidegger's discussion in various essays of land in tenns of "sheltering," "concealing," and "protection"-tenns that speak of a non-metaphysical, nonappropriative relation to the geographical (139-212). Examples of the relation between ethics and geography abound in colonial and postcolonial works of literature. Consider Coetzee's 1983 novel Life and Times of Michael K, a narrative that confronts directly the pain and brutality of Apartheid and which also takes up the issue of human-land relations that have come to define the larger neocolonial world of the late 20 th century, of which Apartheid is only one manifestation. During the course of the novel, Michael K.-a man who tries to inhabit the land but can lay no legal or political claim to the land because only those who have set up enclosed, privatized spaces have access to land-is beaten, imprisoned, manipulated, silenced, and bludgeoned by an ideological imperial order that sees the multitudes of the planet's inhabitants as subhuman and dangerous entities in need of constant surveillance and, ultimately, incarceration. In the face of this crippling world order, Michael K. attempts to carve out an existence for himself in and through a profound but also dreadfully circumscribed relation to the land. Primarily understood as a "postcolonial" novel, Life and Times of Michael K. argues for an awareness of the history of land

316

Robert P. Marzec

relations that inform the production of life in the late 20th century as Coetzee's answer to colonial brutalities presented at the end of the novel cannot be fully appreciated without this awareness. For Coetzee offers us, I argue, the alternative of what we might now call an ethics of inhabitation: [T]he truth is that 1 have been a gardener,...and gardeners spend their time with their noses to the ground ... [Today] they have camps for children whose parents run away, camps for people who kick and foam at the mouth, camps for people with big heads and people with little heads, camps for people with no visible means of support, camps for people chased off the land, camps for people they find living in storm-water drains, camps for street girls, camps for people who can't add two and two, camps for people who forget their papers at home, camps for people who live in the mountains and blow up bridges in the night. ... How many people are there left who are neither locked up nor standing guard at the gate? [...] The mistake I made, he thought, going back in time, was not to have had plenty of seeds, a different packet of seeks for each pockeL.Seeds in my shoes too, and in the lining of my coat, in case of robbers along the way. Then my mistake was to plant all my seeds together in one patch. I should have planted them one at a time spread out over miles of veld in patches of soil no larger than my hand, and drawn a map and kept it with me at all times so that every night I could make a tour of the sites to water them. Because if there was one thing I discovered out in the country, it was that there is time enough for everything. (Is that the moral of it all, he thought, the moral of the whole story: that there is time enough for everything? Is that how morals come, unbidden, in the course of events, when you least expect them?). (182-3) This, the novel's concluding statement, makes manifest the final solution of an ontology of essentialist land relations, the teleological endpoint of the historical continuum we have inherited from the enclosure movement. Michael K. is born into the world of enclosures-the metaphor that Coetzee uses in this particular novel is "camps." And in this world the only reality is the reality of the camps. The camps restrain the heterogeneity of the planet's dispossessed, of the unenclosed that have no claim to the State's metaphysical definition offeasible existence. The camps are for the excluded, the unwanted, the un-homed, the improperly placed. The camps are for those ruthlessly discarded once their utility is used up, and the camps are for those seeking to transgress the dominant ontology of enclosures. In this passage, the ontology of enclosure alongside its coconstituent erasure of inhabitancy achieves its final goal in the accommodation, pacification, and internment of all resistant and errant

Said, Derrida and the Undecidable Human: In the Name of Inhabitancy 317 human forces to its universalist scenario. Coetzee's text wards off the erasure of this history of colonization and keeps the historical record alive in response to the amnesiac culture industry that mass produces the same narrative of History in our contemporary arena. Moreover Coetzee speaks of a different temporality and of a different geography--of a geographyto-corne-and he accomplishes this by constructing Michael K. as a character that defines his existence in terms of an open-relation to the land, and an open temporality that offers the promise of a different historical continuum: "if there was one thing I discovered out in the country, it was that there is time enough for everything." Coetzee's novel also stands as a warning. In Michael K.'s struggle to inhabit the land, Coetzee reveals the impossible situation that the geopolitical wardens of humanity have created for the planet's heterogeneous multitudes. It is the point at which the seemingly benevolent and benign orientation of Robinson Crusoe-his laying of a providential table in the wilderness of unenclosed land-reveals its inherent metaphysical violence. Michael K. is the Friday of our contemporary occasion, the colonized subject reduced to either a life in prison or a life of slow starvation. The novel thus discloses the s impossibility of any future for the planet's unenclosed. Michael K.6 is left with only the hope that a "time for everything" may one day arrive. We frod a similar warning in the literary works of Salman Rushdie. Consider the following passage from his memoir of Nicaragua, The Jaguar Smile:

My last night in Nicaragua was warm and starlit. I spent it at the home of Tulita and Sergio Ramirez, talking mostly about literature....[The title of) Ramirez's novel To Bury Our Fathers derived from The Birds by Aristophanes: [In The Birds] 'The skylark was born before all beings and before the earth itself. Its father died of illness when the earth did not yet exist. He remained unburied for five days, until the skylark, ingenious of necessity, buried its father in its own head.'[ ...]To bury one's ancestors in one's own head, in memory, was to confer upon them a kind of immortality, the only kind human beings could offer one another.... Here...was another echo of.. .Nicaragua as captivity, as exile. The Nicaraguan meaning of the Aristophanes quote could only be that in those days the country wasn ·tthere. Landless, nationless, the people buried their fathers in themselves, because the self was the only ground they had to stand upon. (125-126) Writing to counter the then dominant Reagan Administration rhetoric on Nicaragua as a communist threat to American freedom, Rushdie invokes the impossibility of inhabitancy for the post-Somoza citizen of Nicaragua.

318

Robert P. Marzec

This passage articulates with dreadful clarity the limits of the human in the neo-imperial world of the late 20 th century. The systematic accumulation of land in the colonial occasion continues apace in the postcolonial. An alternative geography to the one disseminated by the ruling custodians of land relations on the planet is made impossible because the tie between the human and the land has been severed: the counter-memory of the past (of the Nicaraguan workers, poets, and politicians that refused to align themselves with the Contra) has no access to the land: the "country wasn't there." This simple three-word phrase speaks to the astonishing limitation imposed on human subjectivity. With the land defined and controlled in advance, there is no hope of local and national self-determination, nor of community-determination. But these three words also gesture toward a (hopeful) future arrival: a land-to-come. From a Derridean perspective, we can see how in the limitation itself lies the call to a future that has yet to arrive. Here we see both the brutality of decidability and the ethical call on the part of Rushdie to that which will break the chain of decidability. This is no "blood-and-soil" politics. Far from it. Rather the call for a land-tocome is precisely the provocation that decenters the human subject from a politics of identity: in "Nicaragua as captivity" the "self is the only ground" (126). Rushdie develops this geographical impasse that defines our era in his 1999 transnational novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Unlike the other narratives I have mentioned in which the land remains passive, in this novel the land become~ an active force. Moreover, this active force is far from being homogenous, even along national lines. The earth is comprised, rather, of the "plates" of different realities (553). However, these geological "plates" continue to be governed by the ontology of essentializing enclosures that the world inherits from the British Empire's expansion across the globe from the 18 th through the 20 th century. Each "plate" adheres to its own essentialist identity politics, which creates even more divisions and conflicts each time a reality needs to confront with its own internal differences: "You can't just keep dividing and slicingIndia-Pakistan, Maharashtra-Gujarat-without the effects being felt ... People fly off into space" (164). The narrator describes how this imperial relation to the land has become a global phenomenon, a geo-politics of domination that damages the land of the planet's South and East continents: In the West the earthquakes have stopped and the construction teams have moved in. Banks and insurance companies are building their new palaces over the faults, as if to assert the primacy of their authority, even over the misbehaving earth itself. The scars left by the quakes are being

Said, Derrida and the Undecidable Human: In the Name of Inhabitancy 319 transformed into regeneration zones, gardens, office blocks, cineplexes, airports, malls.... In the South, however, the devastation continues. It's as if the earth were discriminating against its most di sadvantaged children. In India where houses are built of mud and dreams, where the structures of life are fragile, their foundations weakened by corruption, poverty, fanaticism and neglect, the damage is immense...The fact is that the ground in America is not shaking, but some patch or other of Indian soil...is hit by subterranean tremors almost every day. To many third-world observers it seems self-evident that earth-quakes are the new hegemonic geopolitics, the tool by which the superpower quake-makers intend to shake and break the emergent economies of the South, the Southeast, the Rim. The boastful triumphalism of the West during the revolutionary upheavals of 1989-90 has come back to haunt it. Now all earth tremors are perceived as Euro-American weapons, what were once classified by insurance brokers as acts of god are now close to being treated by entire states as acts of war. ..Indian, Pakistan, Israel, Syria, Iran, Iraq and China all announce the allocation of gigantic "plate wars" budgets. A new kind of weapons scramble has begun...Self respect and national pride are invoked and people declare themselves ready to let their children starve in order to acquire the ability to shake the world. (553-554) Rushdie's novel offers, to recall Said's discussion of Gramsci, a situational, geographical intensity. He is deeply aware that the world is made up of ruler and ruled, and he provides in this and previous novels a profound index of the planet's uneven development. Without such a geographical awareness, I would argue, the novelist runs the risk of producing at best an anaesthetizing encyclopedic record of history's brutalities, at worse a totalizing system that annexes all problems under one rubric. For Rushdie the basic social contest of our contemporary world is the control of fundamentally heterogeneous, non-identical and unequal geographies that mark the human struggle for habitation. His works, and the works of others that I have mentioned here, point the way toward a new historiography, one based on a process of identifying an age through the way in which it relates to the land and constitutes the geography of the earth.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet reveals that actions that erase the planet's inhabitants or actions that seek only to confirm and increase the yield of the most powerful enclosing order are acts of terror directed against the different worlds that arise out of the planet's geography. The situational intensity of inhabitancy, however, offers what is most difficult to theorize. The inhabitant does not speak to a universal community, nor even to a community at all-as that term is understood in the metaphysical tradition of the West. 7 It puts into practice a version of habitation that

320

Robert P. Marzec

wards off an enclosing community that would install a majority, for the invention of a majority is another name for the aggrandizement of territory. In such a system of territorialization the minority in tum are (dis)placed along a cutthroat margin, a non-geography populated by peoples whose energies are eliminated by a futureless system of justice. Against this essentialist formation of the geopolitical-which is a discourse of brutal decidability-the novel's photographer-narrator Rai (who photographs a history "from below") can properly be called an inhabitant, for he is compelled to measure life by situating it against something other than itself. The inhabitant is, therefore, a force of subjectivity that touches upon the transformation of an order through a relation to different geographies. In the word "inhabitant," the self and the imminence that is land are not understood as unrelated entities. Rather, they can only be thought from out of their singular, open relation to one another: the inhabitant is that person who is aware of being constituted by dwelling and having unique dealings with an interconnected place and cohabiting with an interconnected people. The word itself demands that one face the question of relation and connection, and the precise manner that connections, in always being singular, dwell in a specific territoriality. This "territoriality"-because it is thought entirely from the singularity of connections-is not governed by a romantic logic of "blood ties" to either a land or an ethnicity. Moreover, this singular thought of territoriality, along with its co-eonstituent inhabitant subjectivity, can only come into being on the "commons," or on open as opposed to the enclosed land of imperialism. It thus has a fundamental connection to the idea of "openness," to more than one geography, rather than to a closed, calculable field of existence. The erasure of the inhabitant as the basic idea of human subjectivity is therefore a sending-into-oblivion of a particular possibility for being human. Today we take the particular idea of being human holding sway to be self-evident. The knowledge that there is an onto-geo-Iogical ground informing human subjectivity has slipped away from us. We are thus unknowingly captivated by a world that runs its humans with greater and greater speed, giving us little time for thinking the grounds of human existence. The concept of the enclosed, landless (Rushdie's subjects of partition that can only "fly off into space") human today is so generalized, so widespread, that we fail to see the danger in such a way of being. It is also at this point that the form of being human "picks up speed," in the way in which Paul Virilio uses that word to defme the character of our age. It is a concept of the human that maintains its course without being

Said, Derrida and the Undecidable Human: In the Name of Inhabitancy 321

called into question-thus the intensity of its velocity. The erasure of inhabitancy induces the creation of a free-floating human subjectivity, capable of being displaced or made landless at any time at the whim of a large landowner, a large corporation, or simply upon the turning of the unforeseeable twists of the global economic market. We have only to read the latest reports from the sciences to see what the current form of being human has done and continues to do to the ecosystem of the planet. As Said wrote at the end of Culture and Imperialism: "[S]urely it is one of the unhappiest characteristics of the age to have produced more refugees, migrants, displaced persons, and exiles than ever before in history" (332). Thinking ethics, geography, and a notion of the human from the standpoint of inhabitancy thus offers us a certain kind of questioning that opens a space not colonized by History. Here it is important to think the topological location of the inhabitant-not only to think the singularity of a habitation-but also the point of its own limit, its own impossibility, which allows it to think beyond what Rushdie's narrator in The Ground Beneath Her Feet refers to as the "putrefYing carcass of what is the case" (415). The name of inhabitancy thus most emphatically challenges a "spirit of place"-what many traditional ecocritics covet. Against this, inhabitancy names the void around which our Western metaphysical postmodemity is structured. If we do not set out from the impasse of planetary inhabitancy, if we equate the Human with anything other than this, then we can say nothing more of the Human than that it is a preaccomplished, predisposed, victimized body-to speak like Foucault, a "docile body," (135-149) or to speak like Heidegger, "standing-reserve" (Question 115-154). To put it differently, the vulnerability of Michael K. simply will not do. Unlike the name of Iraq-a name that is the political creation of Bush Administrations, one that seeks to aggrandize a territory and produce a high yield for the advantage of the few-the Name of Inhabitancy, with its situational transcendence to "a time for everything," is an address to all. This connection of ethics to geography is more necessary now than ever, for our age faces a new tension between empire on the one hand (and its grounding in an ontology of enclosure), and the counter-ontology of inhabitancy on the other. This tension will come to mark more and more the struggle of our global historical occasion. We can already see this event in communities around the globe, specifically in the many non-State alternative social movements inaugurated by the planet's innumerable dispossessed inhabitants such as the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil, the international peasant movement La Via Campesina, and others. It is the fundamental right to habitation that colonization obliterates. It

322

is the same fundamental right to habitation that peoples across the planet struggle for today in the face of the neoimperialism of transnational corporations. Thinking the ontological status of inhabitancy and geography in general might enable us to rethink the current conditions of possibility that surround acts of decision and to consider undecidable alternatives that will speak ethically to the struggle for social justice in a globalized world that gives greater priority to socio-economic mobility and technological innovation than to the needs and values of communities used and abused by the continuing forces of geopolitical essentialism. In the name of inhabitancy might we establish the fundamental right of habitation that all forms of colonization obliterate.

Notes I A different administration, but one undergirded by a similar ontology, marched through Viet Nam. One wonders what direction "deconstruction" would have taken in the continent, and then in America, if Viet Nam had remained a matter rrimarily of French foreign policy. For an extended analysis of colonial land reformation see my An Ecological and

Postcolonial Study ofLiterature:from Daniel Defoe to Salman Rushdie. 3

This denouncement of geography defines the work of Alain Badiou as well. See

Ethics: an Essay on the Understanding ofEvil.

I take this phrase in part from Bill Readings' work on the "Name of Thought," a phrase designed to foreground the contentless nature of thought as a provocation that functions "not as an answer but as a question," an act of signifYing (naming) that breaks open and stops the circulation of naturalized meaning and cultural capital in the existing social order because it calls for a conversation about that state of affairs. See The University in Ruins, 159-165. 5 In this sense Coetzee's Michael K. rather than the Friday of his novel Foe is the proper character choice for revealing the violence inflicted on today's dispossessed inhabitants. Whereas Foe is essentially a linguistic novel (it tackles the problem of speech and writing, and deconstructs the subjectivity of the liberal humanitarian who would want to help the colonized South African by giving him "voice"), Michael K. is a novel about the impossibility of inhabiting the land. 6 This foreclosure of the future (which is articulated in terms ofland relations), and the gradual erasure of the earth's unenclosed inhabitants is repeated in many novels. If! had more space in this essay to explore the extent of this phenomenon I might include Graham Greene's The Quiet American, Barbara Kingsolver'S The Poisonwood Bible and Prodigal Slimmer, Tayeb Salih's Seasons 0/ Migration to the North, Ngugi Wa Thiongo's The River Between, and Devil on the Cross, Hanif Kureishi's The Black Album, Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, Jeanette Winterson's The Passion, Zadie Smith's White Teeth, and many others. 4

Said, Derrida and the Undecidable Human: In the Name of!nhabitancy 323

Robert P. Marzec

Here it would be important develop Deleuze and Guattari's distinction between a an "exchange-limit" structure and a "threshold-stockpiling" apparatussignificant moment from their magnum opus A Thousand Plateaus, one tellingly overlooked in favor of the more free-floating and poststructuralist appealing "nomadology" (437-448). See also the chapter entitled "Geophilosophy" from

7

What is Philosophy? (85-116).

Works Cited Badiou, Alain. Ethics: an Essay on the Understanding ofEvil. New York: Verso, 2002. Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Cn/soe. New York: Norton, 1994. Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

_. What is Philosophy? Trans. Janis Tomlinson & Graham Burchelllli. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York

& London: Routledge, 1994. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House, 1977. Heidegger, Martin. Parmenides. Trans. Andre Schuwer & Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992. _. "The Age of the World Picture" in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. 115-154. _. "The Origin of the Work of Art" in Basic Writings, Ed. David Farrell Knell. New York: HarperCollins, 1993, 139-212. Marzec, Robert. An Ecological and Postcolonial Study ofLiterature: from Daniel Defoe to Salman Rushdie. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. Said, Edward. "History, Literature and Geography" in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000.

_. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994. Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. New York: Semiotext(e), 1986.

'Another Insistence': Humanism And the Aporia Of Community

CHAPTER THIRTEEN 'ANOTHER INSISTENCE': HUMANISM AND THE ApORIA OF COMMUNITY MINA KARA VANTA & NINA MORGAN

It is in the play of a certain proximity, proximity to oneself and proximity to Being, that we will see constituted, against metaphysical humanism and anthropologism, another insistence of man, one which relays, relieves, supplements that which it destroys, along pathways on which we are, from which we have hardly emerged-perhaps-and which remain to be examined. -Jacques Derrida

Accordingly, every humanism remains metaphysical. In defining the humanity of man, humanism does not ask about the relation of Being to the essence of man; because of its metaphysical origin, humanism even impedes the question by neither recognizing nor understanding it. -Martin Heidegger Humanism, I think, is the means, perhaps the consciousness we have for providing that kind of finally antinomian or oppositional analysis between the space of words and their various origins and deployments in physical and social place, from text to actualized site of either appropriation or resistance, to transmission, to reading and interpretation, from private to public, from silence to explication and

325

utterance, and back again, as we encounter our own silence and mortality-all of it occurring in the world, on the ground of daily life and history and hopes, and the search for knowledge and justice, and then perhaps also for liberation. -Edward Said At the opening of Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty articulates the problematic of humanism as the simultaneously idealized and umealized product of the Enlightenment, as yet another socio-political, historical and cultural contingency of the West.' The humanizing but simultaneously inhuman Europe ruled by the "European colonizer of the 19th century" who "both preached this Enlightenment humanism at the colonized and at the same time denied it in practice" (4) emerges as the idealized political, historical, epistemological and cultural embodiment of this West where, in Frantz Fanon's words, "they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the comer of every one of their own streets, in all the comers of the globe" (251) and operates as a master narrative that Chakrabarty calls a "hyperreality." This hyperreality is the complex outcome of a dense fiction which, while manipulating historical and political realities, represents the Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality2 as founding elements of an "invented tradition"] that elides the ambiguities, blind spots, and dark ages of European history. Humanism is here understood as a party to the creation of this "hyperreal Europe." The real, symbolic, and historical sites of its "hyperreal" structure are so confounded that at least two "Europes" emerge: the Europe whose historical and political materiality thrives in complexity and controversy-the Europe of imperialism and democracy, capitalism and exploitation, equality and discrimination-and the one invented as an ideal, the ideal of democracy, equality, and liberty. These two, and the multiple realities and fictions on which they rely, make up a palimpsest, which conditions and is conditioned by the history of the nonWestern constituencies and formerly and presently colonized subjects often interpreted as absence or lack, and operate as a measure that misrepresents not only its others but also itself. 4 Following Martin Heidegger, one can argue that this misrepresentation constitutes the ontological predicament of the West that in founding the Enlightenment definition of Man in opposition to a radical other-say, the colonized man or the Negros-has forgotten the question ofBeing. 6

326

Karavanta & Morgan

This forgetting, deepened by the triumph of technological civilization and the consequent reification of Being, is the sign of the fulfillment of the metaphysical discourse of humanism rather than a symptom of its end, as Gianni Vattimo argues in The End of Modernity. Embedded in a metaphysical tradition in which "the human subject determines a role for itself which is necessarily central or exclusive" (Vattimo 32), humanism objectifies and reduces the differential temporality of Being to an identity proper established by the imperial and later capitalist hegemonic rule of the 19th and 20th centuries. In inventing the subject as the object of politics, science and civilization, humanism, through its institutions and practices, disseminated an idea of the human that was primarily white, Christian and male, a representative and representational identity-model of the European monarchies and Empires.' Colonization, imperialism, the technological dehumanization and scientific domination of Being, and the presently intensifying global phenomenon of homelessness alongside the subsequent immanence of an exilic consciousness are aligned with the origins and development of the discourses of humanism that have made an inhumane humanism possible. Hence, the temptation to abandon the term and the traditions and disciplines attached to it is strong, palpable. However, the question of Being that humanism posits even under erasure is more than ever present in a postcolonial globality that emerges from the cohabitation of postcolonialism, neo-colonialism and transnational capitalism, a concurrency that accounts for the synergy and concomitance of the first and third worlds in the centers of "global cities" (to follow Saskia Sassen's analysis in her homonymous text) inhabited by constituencies that remain unrepresentable and unconstituted and tom by the "degradation of social relations and 'disaffiliation' of those left behind by globalization" (Balibar 46). In this essay, we reconstellate Edward Said's critical affirmation of humanist praxis with Jacques Derrida's detotalizing analysis of the question of the political in order to contemplate the question of the human and the role of critique in a post-national and post-humanist global era. Said and Derrida, taking their stand on rather different terrains, both poise the question of the promise that an encounter with humanism might hold for us in a world radically transformed into a globality described by the ongoing transmogrification and mobility of identities, constituencies, peoples, cultures, nations, societies-whether that globality is the occasion for a new Europe, another form of citizenship,s a new relation to the state,9 or a different construction of the masses. 1O

'Another Insistence': Humanism And the Aporia Of Community

327

Within this reconstellation or temporary alliance and by reading these two thinkers "contrapuntally" and "deconstructively," we intend to pursue the question of the human in view of the questions of the ontological and the political, in the spirit and name of a hybrid and global community always already present and yet-to-come. Taking on Said's contrapuntal analysis that enables the interpretation of experiences that are "discrepant, ... [though] co-existing" (Culture 32) and Derrida's deconstructive analysis not as a grammatological impasse but as an operation that opens a "community of the question" ("Violence and Metaphysics" 80) and strives for the affirmation of a political statement that enables new visions of the human and herlhis community, we propose a hybrid critical topos where the question of humanism and the quest of community can be thought together.

I. Said's Democratic Criticism as Humanist Praxis In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said proposes the literary practice and political praxis of secular criticism in order to read the maps and ruins of imperialism and simultaneously excavate the Western representation of the world by delving into the system of values and ideas projected as universal signifiers and employed to indicate the development of a humanistic culture and tradition. Said's secular criticism recognizes the multiple borrowings and reciprocal investments of imperialism and Western culture; it sets out to articulate the problematic of their narratives and thus symptomatically reads the omissions, the fragments, and the oversights of these narratives that invent the world as a whole (i.e. Matthew Arnold's concept of culture as a whole way oflife in Culture and Anarchy), namely as a closed system that cancels the heterogeneity of experience (i.e. T. S. Eliot's analysis of a linearly developing Western tradition in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture but also in essays like "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "What Is a Classic?"). Said's meticulous reading of the affiliations between texts and Empire, which consolidate and proliferate the division between the imperial and the colonized subjects, delivers the promise to "challenge the sovereign and unchallenged authority of the allegedly detached Western observer" (Culture 51) through an interpretation that opens the realm of critique of the metaphysical and political narratives that have silenced the other. Said thus argues: we should keep before us the prerogatives of the present as signposts and paradigms for the study of the past. ..so not to level or reduce differences, but rather to convey a more urgent sense of the interdependence between

328

Karavanta & Morgan

things ... [and] speak of overlapping territories, intertwined histories common to men and women, whites and non-whites, dwellers in the metropolis and on the peripheries, past as well as present and future; these territories and histories can only be seen from the perspective of the whole of secular human history. (61) This "whole of secular human history" is the foundation of Said's "secular interpretation" that explores and articulates a "secular and humane vision, one based on the idea of human history not being the result of divine intervention but a much slower process than the politics of identity usually allow" (Power 130). Said practices this "slower process" of interpretation throughout his work and especially in Culture and Imperialism, where he brings together a meticulous and attentive analysis of the aesthetic, political and socialth aspects of Western artistic forms-the British novel of the 18'h and 19 centuries and Verdi's Aida being two indicative examples-to explore not only their investment in Western culture and consequent implication in the imperialist project but also to consider their contribution to the site of critique. A reading of their textualities that requires what Said calls "an interpretive sophistication" (Power 130) does not simply recognize their canonical value but aims at the articulation and analysis of the details of life that make up the production of men and women's own history and make it possible for scholars and readers "to interpret that history in secular terms, under which religions are seen ...as a token of submerged feelings of identity, of tribal solidarity" (Power 129). Once interpreted, the details of the everyday life of various localities manifested in different narratives belong to a site continuously enriched by other interpretations and other lives, a site that reveals "the dense fabric of secular life, which can't be herded under the rubric of national identity or can't be made entirely to respond to this phoney idea of a paranoid frontier separating 'us' from 'them'" (Said, Critical 233) and so operates as a transnational and decentered community "that is political, cultural, intellectual, and is not geographically and homogeneously defined" (233). Said critiques the imperial project that is indissolubly related to the humanistic tradition of the West through his critical narration of the history of the marginalized constituency as well as a detailed and complex cartography of the systemic oppression of non-Western cultures and identities. Nevertheless, Said neither defies nor refutes the benign terms of the universality proclaimed by the imperialist project; albeit oppressive precisely because bound to imperialism, this universality is founded on the vision of a common or shared ground of experience. The existence of this common ground, not of sweetness and light, as Matthew Arnold would have it, but of discord and disjunctive experiences of rule, of oppression

'Another Insistence': Humanism And the Aporia Of Community

329

and of "appropriations, common experiences, and interdependencies of all kinds among different cultures" (Culture 217) is for Said a "universal norm" that indicates that cultures are not impermeable but transgressive and overlapping. This "universal norm" assumes the presence of a "symphonic whole," a "secular historical experience" (44) that, rather than nurture a transcendental metanarrative of an exclusive progress and development, celebrates a polyphony of cultures, identities and voices whose history of oppression interferes with the Western narrative of progress and development and reveals how the "history of all cultures is the history of cultural borrowings" (217). The project of secular criticism is to narrate these borrowings, to reinvent and relocate the common and shared ground of experience outside and yet within the universal; thus, secular criticism, while piercing through the problematic of the universal, tries to envision it anew and in the name of all humans. The reinvention of a universal imaginary disentangled from the non-forsaken history of oppression that will propose an alternative imagination, an alternative community-what Said gestures to when he refers to the global and the hybrid at the end of Culture and Imperialism-is the result of a persevering!! "secular and affiliated criticism" (60) that undoes the imperial heritage surnrnoned in all its complexity by recollecting its ruins and narratives in the present, even as and especially when it imagines the future. As Said argues, the "principal aim" of this a-systemic criticism!2 is "not to separate but to connect" (14). Thus, Said does not abandon the possibility for an alternative universal vision, one that emerges from the "contrapuntal" reading of the "intertwined and overlapping histories" (18) that occupy the imperialist and post-imperial territories and discourses, as it is only through pursuing his critique of the political repercussions of the metaphysical discourse of the imperialist narratives that have discursively framed the non-metropolitan peoples and their lands in misrepresentations and distortions that he can produce a just reading. In fear of the overwhelming presence of a parochial and nationalist agenda that threatens to saturate the political arena of both the postcolonial and post-imperial nations with the teleological structures and myths of national purity, Said proposes the praxis of secular criticism as the generating force of the "larger, more generous human realities of community among cultures, peoples and societies" (217). These, rather than the Eurocentric, imperial agenda, will be the manifestations of a "new universal" realized with the literary and political recognition of an alwaysalready emergent community, hybrid and global, rather than metropolitan and parochial, that will "achieve solidarities as an essentially imagined

330

33\

Karavanta & Morgan

'Another Insistence': Humanism And the Aporia Of Community

basis" (216) and be the space of the "real human liberation portended by the resistance to imperialism" (217). Said is attuned to the danger of the seductive narrative of universality and, yet, recognizes it as the necessary risk that the praxis of secular criticism has to take if the intellectual is to overcome her/his "easy certainties" of "background, language, nationality" and see the "reality of others" (Said, Representations xii). The universal will emanate from the effort to critically narrate impossible affiliations between center and periphery, local and global, and local and local, and be the articulation of • moments of crisis rather than a set of unquestionable values; it will thus re-imagine and reinvent a human community not of filiations but affiliations, of non-negotiable and yet shared differences (Said, World 2324). This community can be pursued and created through the meticulous analysis of texts studied as events, as "worldly" parts of the "social world, human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted" (4). Said's definition of the worldly aspect of texts that narrate a human community that is shared against and because of all "discrepant experiences" (Culture 31-43) marks the opening of the literary to the political. Texts should not be condemned and censored for their authors' attachments to social and political institutions but should be critically analyzed for their accountability to and their connection with power and its networks, or what Louis Althusser calls the Ideological and Repressive 13 State Apparatuses. As sites of the aesthetic and the imaginative but also the political and the historical, texts are an open and standing invitation to an attentive, and, thereby, provisional and never conclusive, a-systemic analysis of the multiple connections they hold to the world, that world realized through other texts, discourses, events, practices, and the every day reality of other and often radically different constituencies. For Said, the need to study texts in such a contrapuntal way that summons the constellation of affiliations made by force but also through relations of interconnectedness and interdependence determines the ethical and political dimensions of the role of literature in a global age. It is through literature and its complex role in affirming and resisting, assisting and desisting power that the question of humanism and the role of the disciplines of the humanities can be rethought. In Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Said insists on the political quest of humanism, remaining faithful to humanism's positive potential as pursued by the Humanities, despite the restrictions set by the academic institutionalization on its various disciplines. Here, Said identifies the future of the Humanities with the future of a humanist praxis of

intellectual rigor and self-critique and proposes a tum to philology as the arduous and meticulous praxis that achieves a closeness to texts and articulates their opaque ties to culture and politics; such a tum will illumine the vocabulary of a literary and political imagination imbued by the hybrid rather than the nationally pure identity politics of old and new nationalisms. This new vocabulary of "mobility, mutability, displacement, nonidentity, transgression, transformation" (Gourgouris 69) will fashion a "different kind of humanism that. .. [is] cosmopolitan" (Said II), that will operate as the reminder of the survival of other humanisms like "emancipatory humanism, the ethics of coexistence, figural paradigms of ontogenesis in world-historical forms of culture, and the ideal of translalio as portal to a universal or sacred language" (Apter 35). Despite its own incompleteness and fallibility, humanist praxis as the usable form of intellectual labor pursued in the Humanities can, in Said's view, relieve the relevant disciplines of their moral impasse. Seeing humanism as a secular product and not as a pure idea (the tragic flaw of the Cartesian practice of humanism in the 19lh century imperial network that established a white ideal that a priori excluded difference in the name of a pure identity), Said correlates it not only with the "human capacity for expression" (15) but with human labor associated both with the production of work and with the making of connections and affiliations in our everyday lives. Said defends the need to return to humanism through and, when necessary, against poststructuralist critique and identifies the salvation and development of the Humanities in the global age with the question and quest of humanism in such a particular way that, at times, one hears the echoes of the New Critics' claim for an organic community. Despite discounting Deconstruction's critique of Western metaphysics as foundational to the origins of the ideological and political practices of humanism, Said hopes nevertheless to resuscitate the question of the human in an age when that question has been abandoned and forgotten under the domination of transnational capitalisms. Independently of Said's claim that this humanism will carry the Enlightenment torch without the elitism of the past or the present, his cautious warning against a humanist practice that assumes a territorial and imperial "we" nevertheless implies the existence of a space where a gathering, a critique and a democratic practice will be held. Said hints that "America," whose "core" is determined by its constitutional values and political power, is this special site of "civic co-existence" (49) wherein critique of the philological nature should most appropriately be "worldly and integrating" rather than "separating or partitioning" (50) in order to

332

Karavanta & Morgan

recognize the evils of nationalism, religious enthusiasm and discrimination. 14 Despite his own warning against identitying this enabling critique with a "lazy or a laissez-faire feel-good multiculturalism" (50) that often conceals the harsh reality of the "arrogant interventionism" of American nationalism in "places like Iraq" (50), Said identifies America as the "polyglot country" that facilitates the role of the "American humanist" whose mission is "not to consolidate and affirm one tradition' over all the others" but to open them all, or as many as possible, to each other, to question each of them for what it has done with the others, to show how in this polyglot country in particular many traditions have interacted and-more importantly--ean continue to interact in peaceful ways, ways never easy to find but nonetheless discoverable also in other multicultural societies like the former Yugoslavia or Ireland or the Indian subcontinent or the Middle East. (49) Said's identification of America as such a privileged site, despite "all sorts of inequities and disparities" (49) that characterize all multicultural societies, appears to undermine his own recommendation for an attentive reading attuned to the details and the margins-as such a reading would demonstrate how the interaction of all these traditions has not always been a peaceful one and "America's" multilingual background has been restricted and oppressed by the monolingualism of English. It would be wrong and greatly unjust to assume that Said, author of two pioneering texts like Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1994) which inaugurated a politically and intellectually vibrant postcolonial critique, suddenly in Humanism and Democratic Criticism has become blind to the attentive reading and critical scrutiny bred within the field and deaf to the exilic voices of the global age. Such a poor reading of Said's work would fail to recognize his severe critique of American New Humanism and its representatives' idea of recasting civilization and light in the single size and shape of the superpower and would also fail to acknowledge his political commitment to the Palestinian cause,15 a commitment characterized by what Paul Bove aptly and beautifully calls a "political morality ofa kind that alone makes civilization possible" (I). However, any retrieval of the question of humanism without fully and persistently remembering and critiquing the social, cultural and political investments of its metaphysical discourses in the history of imperialism and its conscious vindication of the discourses of racism and sexism is likely to produce another overwhelming and oppressive definition of the human that will rely on a hasty and, alas, ineffective reading of history and

'Another Insistence': Humanism And the Aporia Of Community

333

politics. Against Said's better judgment and best intentions, his representation of America as a site of a mostly uninterrupted "civic coexistence" (49) is such an example of hastiness. Said's vast erudition and worldliness as a critic, an academic, a teacher and a man who risked his life to speak truth to power cannot explain his impatience with the persistent and remaining need to dismantle the politics and history of humanism in the name of a new humanism open to all humans. It indicates how even a "new" and informed humanist position can too easily forget the importance of remembering and never tiring to emphasize that some differences, inequities and disparities cannot be evened out as they often represent a history of violent interactions between constituencies that still live under conditions of inequality and suffer from policies-if not a cullure--of discrimination. This forgetting is symptomatic of a retrieving gesture of humanism that, to follow Jacques Derrida, takes up a '''metahumanism position' that remains historically regional, periodic, and peripheral, juridically secondary and dependent, whatever interest and necessity it might retain as such" for it "does not first catch up with the archaeological radicalness of the questions sketched by Heidegger" and "does not place itself within the opening of these questions" (Margins 128). Said's call for a critical praxis that paves the way to the remaking of democracy now based on the vision of a new humanism cannot be ventured without those pauses and breaks that incite this critique to be self-reflective and constantly attentive to the bleak heritage of the fallacies and distortions of the concepts on which it relies. These breaks (caesuras, fissures, moments of aporia), which for Derrida's deconstructive critique are moments of undecidability (his detractors have often mistaken or intentionally misinterpreted them as politically irresponsible theoretical jargon) are openings to the past that do not close off the invitation to think and respond to the demands of the present. For Derrida, these are opportunities to be open to the ethical question. In his work, Said often engages texts and events that require a critical self-reflexivity that protects his critique from resorting to a facile and reductive interpretation of the historical, political, and aesthetic complexity of the text. Said's attentiveness to moments of aporia and conflict, irresolvability and complexity, signifies his own long-lasting care and respect for alterity, be it textual, political, historical. Albeit different in tonality and modality, Said's care for otherness is not oppositional or radically alien to Derrida's commitment and engagement with the question of dijj'ffrance as a question that leads to what Derek Attridge has called a "detotalizing interrogation" that "summons...an undecidability, which is always an opportunity and a demand, a chance and a risk" (5). This kind of

334

Karavanta & Morgan

'Another Insistence': Humanism And the Aporia Of Community

deconstructive critique, as opposed to an insular and more grammatological deconstruction like the one Said rejects in defiance when he refers to the "crippling limitation in those varieties of deconstructive Derridean readings that end (as they began) in undecidability and uncertainty" (Humanism 66), remains responsible to alterity-the alterity of texts, constituencies, events, cultures-by remaining open to the fissures, margins, complexities and aporias of texts and events. Attentive ' to a "completely heterogeneous alterity that overwhelms all oppositionality" (Attridge 13), such a deconstructive critique demands a , similar kind of political and ethical responsibility to and engagement with Said's secular critique or what Aamir Mufti, in inverting the terms, has called "critical secularism."16 Despite Said's gestures of disaffiliation toward deconstructive critique, his own words indicate a poststructuralist approach to the challenge of critical inquiry. In the last lines of his chapter "The Return to Philology" in Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Said asserts that "more than ever, then, we have to practice a para-doxical mode ofthought" and goes on to say that doing so will rekindle humanist critique as that "kind of finally antinomian or oppositional analysis between the space of words and their various origins and deployments [... J, from text to actualized site of either appropriation or resistance..." (83). This is, after all, a mode that destabilizes structures and frames of interpretation and which attends to the details and the margins that cannot be accounted for by the context but instead haunt it like traces of an-other being, an-other difference, an-other singularity. For Derrida, this ''para-doxical mode" is the interpretative frame of undecidability that we propose in what follows to be read not as a symptom of eternal deferral but as the affirmative gesture of an imaginative grammar that is attentive to the singularity and heterogeneity not only of texts but also of human experience.

known as "messianicity without messianism," what is "to come." This imaginative grammar should suggest to us Derrida's proposition for a humanist praxis that binds the ontological and the political in a way not dissimilar to Said's via the actions of persistent critique: "one keeps this indefmite right to the question, to criticism, to deconstruction (guaranteed rights, in principle, in any democracy: no deconstruction without democracy, no democracy without deconstruction)" (Politics 105). Standing, like Said, before the question of the revision of national identities and the complexities of the emerging globality oscillating between infmite free play and normativity,18 Derrida posits the question of whether it is possible for us to keep the name of democracy-a concept, like that of humanism, compromised by its origins and history. If it is the case, as Said says, that there is "no contradiction" between humanism and participatory citizenship--no aporia-it might only be due to the analogous nature of the constructs of humanism and democracy. As Derrida, through a reading of Nicole Loraux, asks if there is the possibility of a democracy that is not bound by "equality of birth, isogonia. and equality of rights, isonomia" (Politics 104), if there is a possibility of a democracy that would "exclude democracy from autochthonous and homophilic rooting" (I 04), he is also asking a question about the possibilities of humanism itself:

II. Derrida's Imaginative Grammar: The Praxis of What is to Come It is clear that in his last years Derrida's philosophy took on a political intensity that was, by some, seen as lacking in his earlier thinking. 17 At the same time, he reiterated an intellectual position that consistently posited the perfectability of some practice, value, or idea-say, democracy or justice-to be only in the place of what is to come, a new kind of imaginative grammar that speaks in the present of both the past and the future, like the "future perfect" against which social change might be measured and toward which the gesture of change is directed: what is also

335

Would it still make sense to speak of democracy when it would no longer be a question (no longer in question as to what is essential or constitutive) of country, nation, even of State or citizen-in other words, if at least one still keeps to the accepted use of this word, when it would no longer be a political question? (104) To speak of democracy as nonpolitical may well be to speak of humanism in a globalizing context, as a '''democracy to come' would go beyond the limits of cosmopolitanism, that is, of a world citizenship" (Derrida, "Autoimmunity" 130). Here, in the contemporary intersection of these two compromised discourses, both with their fictions, their homophilia, their ironic history of excluding the Other, their self-determination dogmas, and their claim to community is the agenda of the critique: under the auspices of a globalizing, hybridizing world, another democracy must come, another humanism must come, despite the contradictions (and without simply denying their presence), through a critical praxis "without becoming discouraged by the aporias such work must necessarily encounter" ("Autoimmunity" I 14). In that light, Derrida proposes a kind of democracy "yet-to-come" (a venir) as the concept of a promise that is nevertheless present and thus

336

Karavanta & Morgan

viable and not a promise of a kind of euphoric utopia never to be realized. This kind of democracy will manifest itself not as the completion and fulfilment of a well-regulated order that relies on old binaries made anew (the "us/them" divide that metaphysically demarcated the barbarian in opposition to the civilized man now turned into the rhetoric of order and terrorism, George Bush's "either with us or against us") but as a possibility at a moment of failure, as a deferral at a moment of disjunction or better as a "time out of joint" (Specters 174). Democracy of the real present (present vivant) and not of the present future (present fulur) will be attentive to the "singular urgency of a here and now" (Politics 105) and be bound to "a politics, a friendship, a justice which begin by breaking with their naturalness or their homogeneity, with their alleged place of origin" (105). This is an instance ofa disjunction that makes the political event of democracy possible precisely because it breaks away from the politics of homogeneity, namely, the politics of national agendas or the international policies and politics of global surveillance that can monitor and record communication in order to protect and safeguard it: Today we have a State just as 'liberal' and 'democratic', just as concerned over its responsibilities, as its citizens, but providing it can maintain its hold on the means of protecting internal security and national defence-that is, the possibility of bugging everything every time it deems it necessary-politically necessary-to do so (internal and external security). (Politics 144) Hence, the question of the political must be disconnected, disengaged from the current politics and policies of practicing a democracy that serves the state of surveillance in order for this democracy "yet-to-come" to be imagined and be presently possible. This impasse-an inoperative political praxis that still has to produce the political result of a democracy of the 'real present'----can be overcome only if the political can also be reinvented as a politics of friendship that caters to the need for "living with" (Politics 20) and developing a friendship with the absolute stranger with whom there is no "common measure, reciprocity or equality" nor "a horizon of recognition" (Politics 35). In a world restructured by the disintegration of national agendas, the emergence of new nations, the fall of old regimes and the global flows of migrants, immigrants, exiles, boat people and displaced constituencies, new collectivities arise not on the basis of homogeneous cultures but on the sharing of needs "without a familial bond, without proximity, without oikeiotes [familiarity]" (35) and without any preconditioning truth, other than the fate of being thrown together.

'Another Insistence': Humanism And the Aporia Of Community

337

This fate requires a turning to the other as a response to the call that the other's presence or, to invoke Emmanuel Levinas, the other's face makes. For Derrida, the call of the face that "speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation incommensurable with a power exercised, be it enjoyment or knowledge" (Levinas 198) is the call of an impossible friendship with the absolute stranger, at times the absolute enemy, with no other bonds but that of the mutual recognition of each other's humanity or need to be acknowledged even in those conditions of strangeness and destitution that make the human's humanity unrecognizable. In defining the ethical call of the face, Levinas reminds us that the "transcendence of the face is at the same time its absence from this world into which it enters, the exiling [depaysement] of a being, his condition of being stranger, destitute, or proletarian" (75).19 In a world remapped by the derootings and rerootings of peoples, this condition of estrangement and displacement, binding some peoples more than others (for despite Levinas' metaphysical claim about the condition of estrangement, some are more "the stranger" and thus more displaced than others), is becoming the condition that determines one's "living with" the other. This condition is complicated by the question of Said's sense of inherent homelessness (inspired by Hugh of St. Victor)2o and Derrida's assertion of not belonging, for both indicate that only through their disaffiliation might they maintain a level of enough "independence" (Said's word) and "freedom" (Derrida's word) to be open to the alterity of the other. Where does this leave us in terms of the impasse we face when rethinking the community today? Derrida's "yet-to-come" as making possible a "living with" the impossible stranger is the act of humanist praxis and critique that keeps the question of what is human open by persistently questioning the location of its realization. Derrida conceptualizes the site where "singular beings" can "'live together,' there where they are not yet defined by citizenship, that is, by their condition as lawful 'subjects' in a state or legitimate members of a nation-state or even a confederation or world state" ("Autoimmunity" 130). What is "yet to come" reverberates with Said's claim for a humanist praxis that will respond to the imperative to imagine a humanism in the name of humans (not just the Western human) without closing off the ontological critique that is necessary if the political possibility is to remain open. However, Derrida cannot locate this in America (as Said suggests)much less in an American department of English literature; in fact, Derrida points to sources of resistance that work to de-institutionalize and to dissociate from the predominant social structures: What I call messianicity without messianism is a call, a promise of an independent future for what is to come, and which comes like every

338

Karavanta & Morgan messiah in the shape of peace and jlls/ice, a promise independent of

religion.... [I]t is a matter of marking a place where these messianisms are exceeded by messianicity, that is to say by that waiting without waiting, without horizon for the event to come, the democracy to come with all its contradictions. And I believe we must seek today, very cautiously, to give force and form to this messianicity, without giving in to the old concepts of politics (sovereignism, territorialized nation-state)'>! Because there are no true equivalencies in these resistances, there is no "impasse" as such between globalization and anti-globalization movements. Likewise, there is no impasse between the domination of the sign and small voice of humanism. No impasse between the unconditional gift of hospitality and the condition of the law. Instead, there is resistance. There is alterity. And, as Derrida tells us, because of these, there is a promise of a future: "The possibilization of the impossible must remain at one and the same time as undecidable--and therefore as decisive--as the future itself' (Politics 29). It "require[s] another thought and another putting into practice of the concept of the 'political' and the concept the 'world' ..." ("Autoimmunity" 131) To say that protest is dead, that humanism is invalid, that the insurgency is "in the last throes"-as Dick Cheney famously said in the Spring of 2005-indicates a failure of imagination of the most miserable proportions. Thus Derrida-who has never been accused of a failure of imagination-intimates to us, "I have always dreamed of resistance" (Paper 115).22 This is not a resistance for the sake of resistance or for the sake of opposition as Derrida, unlike Said, does not see opposition as a resource for humanist practice, what Said ambivalently addresses as "the dialectic of opposites" (Humanism 43). Clearly, from Derrida's perspective, resistance must be ethical-not necessarily legal, not in accordance with religious or juridical law-but nevertheless faithful to the possibility of the impossible what-is-to-come. Whatever site is opened up for community, it will, ironically, contain resistance as what Derrida reads as the community's inevitable autoimmune response may lead not to its destruction but instead to a hybridized other form of itself, a reconstellated community. The unconditional gift of hospitality as a symptomatic gesture of such an impossible possibility operates as an act of ethical resistance that enables the making of a community with the absolute stranger. Thus for Derrida such a resistance opens the question of the political by engaging a politics of friendship in the name of the absolute stranger, the unnameable and undocumented other. This absolute stranger, manifest in the bodies of immigrants, exiles, refugees flooding the great urban centers, has to be greeted unconditionally despite and against the conditions set by the house (estia).

'Another Insistence': Humanism And the Aporia Of Community

339

The appalling conditions of these nomadic, exilic and migrant flows that should not be romanticized create a state of emergency that requires that the gift of hospitality be absolute and unconditionally offered "not only to the foreigner (provided with a family name...) but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other" (Hospitality 25). For Derrida, the question of humanism is articulated in the voice of the foreigner "who has to ask for hospitality in a language which by definition is not his own" but is rather "imposed on him by the master of the house, the host, the king, the lord, the authorities, the nation, the State, the father" (Hospitality 15). Forced to speak in translation, without rights and without a home, the foreigner nevertheless invokes the law of hospitality, demanding that it be absolute and therefore opposes those laws that bind hospitality to the state, which is often unwelcoming and resists the foreigner's entrance. For a truly hospitable and not hostile hospitality, the "law of absolute hospitality" arises and "commands a break with hospitality by right, with law or justice as rights" (25). Not condemning the law of hospitality by right, this absolute hospitality requires that the praxis of hospitality remain open and unconditional, albeit conditioned by the laws of the state. Just as justice has to oppose the laws that protect it to remain irreducible to them and in perpetual motion, so should absolute hospitality question the limits of the praxis of hospitality as the states and the metropolises condition its operation. This "play" between justice and the law, absolute and operative hospitality, opens the site where the question of humanism should be articulated and pursued. This is the site of the political in a communityyet-to come, a community which like the "new cities" (Cosmopolitanism 23) that Derrida invokes in his essay "On Cosmopolitanism" will reflect and act upon a democratic praxis that brings the question of the political to the question of the absolute stranger in order to articulate a "politics, an ethics, a law that thus answer to the new injunctions of unprecedented historical situations" (Hospitality 149). In view of this emergency that requires that a community-to-come, which is open to the absolute stranger, be imagined, humanism and democratic praxis must be rethought-in fact, reconstellated-along the lines of global hybridity.

III. Humanism & the Impossible Possibility of Envisioning a Community of Strangers Said's politics of secular interpretation and Derrida's politics of friendship are two individual enterprises, which, once reconstellated, can be allied to each other to envision such a community. They both bind the

340

Karavanta & Morgan

'Another Insistence': Humanism And the Aporia Of Community

praxis of humanist critique with the political, namely, with participatory citizenship for "there is, in fact, no contradiction at all between the practice of humanism and the practice of participatory citizenship" (Said, Humanism 22). The question of humanism and the quest of community nowadays frame the question of the political not bound by politics-that is, the politics of the disintegrating and yet resuscitated national or fundamentalist agendas that give shape to instances of neo-nationalismsbut provoked by and provoking the need to correlate the philosophical with the social and the political to think them, as Said would put it, ~ "contrapuntally." Returning or turning to humanism is for Said an intellectual, philological, and political gesture necessitated by the conditions of the Humanities; however, it also is, as we argue in this discussion, ontologically necessitated, despite Said's quick annulment of the Heideggerian question of the ontological. Such a defiant pose cannot erase criticism's need to acknowledge not only the philological but also the ontological and political charges against humanism which itself needs to be defmed, critiqued and pursued from the perspective of the heterogeneity of human experience against the metaphysical burden of its universalizing rhetoric. If humanism is not to be a nostalgic and desperate gesture of invoking an organic-but not viable--community nor the attempt to create a narrow-minded and chauvinistic elite that projects the one pure, often nationally homogeneous, identity in the name of the many-what Said implies in his well-justified critique of New Humanism-then, in Said's words, humanist praxis should be critique: "critique that is directed at the state of affairs in, as well as out of, the university (which is certainly not the position adopted by the carping and narrow humanism that sees itself as an elite formation) and that gathers its force and relevance by its democratic, secular, and open character" (Humanism 22). Philology can be the opening site of this critique, which, in demanding attentive reading, can educate us on care and responsibility,23 and can imagine and narrate the site of community where the philological, the ontological, and the political are bound with each other. Even in dismissing the ontological and, always already attentive to the existence of those unconstituted constituencies whose existence is denied, "the homeless wanderers, nomads, vagrants unassimilated to the emerging structures of institutional power, rejected by the established order for their intransigence and obdurate rebelliousness" (Culture 332), and the impossible in-between they inhabit, Said is attuned to the question of territory and displacement (82), to the scars of the "cultural map of imperialism" (332), that is, to the question not only of what the human is but where it is. 24

Whereas Said expresses a desire for a return-a "Return to Philology" (the title of the third chapter of Humanism and Democratic Criticism)-a return to literary tradition, a return to English departments as sites of radical transformation, Derrida contends that we understand deconstruction as "an act of resistance" that "also derives from an act of faith" (Paper 116), which is at play presently in the idea of the future. Derrida's dynamic of faithful resistance is one of action via the work of interpretation, which is not exactly analogous to Said's production of criticism per se as this act requires that we believe in what is beyond our practical experience and use that understanding to shape our expectation of the real future of our intellectual crossroads where, say, no one in his right mind would assert that "the justice system" works, but would at the same time nevertheless believe that he was capable of imagining justice being done, thereby equating future contingencies: no justice, no peace. If we consider that Said places his hopes for humanity in his brand of humanism, Derrida offers us the condition of a dream always already deferred to the future: something that is "at once" itself and its other but is hardly whole and certainly never perfect or ideal. Asserting that what is needed today is more human rights25 and recognizing globalization as a contradictory and complex phenomenon that "does not take place in the places and at the moment it is said to take place" and "everywhere it takes place without taking place, it is for better and for worse" ("Autoimmunity" 133), Derrida juxtaposes the impoverishment of the majority-the "for worse"-against the spectacle of prosperity that technology allows so many to witness, while he acknowledges the "for better" of the transmission of models of democracy through the same media and communication technologies which also serve to provide opportunities for access to information and to disseminate knowledge. Importantly, he indicates through the wedding rhetoric here implied that the rocky marriage made between economics and technology has born a social condition akin to some kind of oedipal child that has both slid into bed to please us and slid out to kill us. Globalization operates in (at least!) two different albeit simultaneous orders: it is a hyper hybrid condition that dissembles while it simultaneously assembles a new world order. In our contemporary discursive, political, social, ethical and phenomenological structures, the bringing together of the poison and the cure, presence and absence--even though for Derrida these things are always already within each other-appears to the person who is not a "philosopher-deconstructor" (this is the hybrid term that Derrida prefers)26 as an aporia, an impossible impasse that does the opposite of lead to a trajectory of the future and must be warded off at all costs.

341

342

Karavanta & Morgan

Derrida investigates this trajectory of "yet-to-come" as the "unheardof, totally new experience of the perhaps" (Politics 29) that intertwines the political vision of a desired "yet-to-come" with the envisioning politics of a desirable "will come." This play between possibility and event, will and desire, and present and future is pursued on the site that the question ofthe political opens not only in political but also philosophical terms. Asked from within the site that suffers from a lack-"Without a familial bond, without proximity, without oikeiotes" (35)--the question of the political is the question of a "friendship without proximity, without presence, _ therefore without resemblance, without attraction, perhaps even without significant or reasonable preference" (35). This community of "social disaggregation (deliaison)" (35) is the site that the question of the human unconceals while questing it. The question's quest-"what is human," "where is it"-retrieves its impossible and yet emerging community: the community of disavowed constituencies displaced, exiled, removed from their homes, the "community of those without community" (Bataille qtd. in Derrida 37) arriving to encounter the present communities being transformed by the constant and rapid (willful or not) displacement of peoples. These emergent hybrid communities urge consideration of the question of the human, the question of love and friendship (even the impossible love and friendship with the unrecognizable one, the radical other), the question of a "minimal community-but also incommensurable to all others" (Politics 236), a community of foreigners "borne beyond being-in-common, beyond being-common or sharing, beyond all common appurtenance (familial, neighborhood, national, political, linguistic and finally generic appurtenance), beyond the social bond itself-if that is possible" (297-8), and yet a community that investigates the possibility of friendship as an alliance without prerequisites that preorder and prescribe the making of that community. In opposition to the social order or rather outside/in it and the idea of sovereignty it represents, as it does not have to strive for a social order or abide by it, community exists for its own sake often coming together in a haphazard fashion. This idea of fatal existence, or what Etienne Balibar calls the "fate of being thrown together" (40), is the reason we should return and retrieve the concept of community. Not only do we ask what the human is and how we can think critically about it, but we are also obliged to ask where the human is and in what kind of context can its estia-its home-be. At the close of Culture and Imperialism, Said predicts the massiveness and persistence of the phenomenon not of nomadic luxury but of the painful trajectories of the exiled and displaced peoples in the world. Many

'Another Insistence': Humanism And the Aporia Of Community

343

years later, and in a book about the condition and vision of Europe, Balibar argues that the proliferation of "communities of fate" (44), forced by history to live together and invent the rules of their co-existence, reveals how exclusive and restrictive the concretization of the European citizenship is as it is being constructed from above (the nation-states of Europe misrecognizing themselves in their old banners and emblems of their identities) and not from below, that is, from all those who are present and active in the social space of the ever-changing urban centers, the old metropolises now turning into global cities. Balibar recognizes the urgency for a useful concept of community at a time when borders, identities and belongings are debatable and a new version of "reason of state" and its arcana imperii bring about the control of the social body by the police, the arbitrary power of the administration over "second-class citizens," loss of legitimacy of representative organs (such as the municipal governments of cities that contain a large population of residents without citizenship), transformation of civil servants into petty tyrants convinced that they "are the law" over an inferior population (just as was the case in the colonial empire). (64) To add to this list, this is the era of what Jeremy Rifkin has called the end of labor when the constituencies' right for work is reduced to their bare right to work, which implies the loss of benefits and privileges and the equation of work to mere survival. Finally, this is also the time of the individuals' loss of their rights to privacy and mobility, when immigrants of specific religious and cultural backgrounds are demonized and "cosmopolitan estrangement and democracy-enriching dissent are not prized as civic assets" (Gilroy 27). Thus Balibar's articulation of "a citizenship without community" (76) accounts for the condition of the constituency that is both inside and outside, obligated and not, or under some conditions included and under others excluded. This condition reveals a dynamic that is both public and private, of the state and of the body, national and international, that draws together the disparate histories of colonialism and expansionism: the fantasy of sovereignty. Informed by these disparate histories and specifically shaped by the phenomenon of globalization in contemporary life, this condition of being and living that we call the "global hybrid" threatens sovereignty at the level of the individual, at the level of identity. The "global hybrid" as a condition of being and living in a global world is a term that does not describe or identify a specific constituency but opens the network of local, global, regional and national flows and brings together a range of themes and a variety of disciplines that articulate and theorize this illimitable

344

Karavanta & Morgan

phenomena of change and transformation that affect the lives of constituencies and displaced peoples all around the globe. Global hybridization opens the "site of a politics of theory" (Kraniauskas 239), the site of interaction and interrogation of disciplines where the "disjunctive... enunciations" (Bhabha qtd. in Kraniauskas 239) and the various modes of transculturation that resist acculturation and the homogenizing conditions imposed by "superior cultures" on "inferior ones" will give voice to what Emesto Laclau calls "the constitutive outside" (qtd in Kraniauskas 239). The global hybrid as a truncated deterritorialized and reterritorialized subject recognizes this site of multiple crossings and overcomes frontiers as what Nestor Garcia Canclini calls a "decentered multidetermined" (qtd. in Kraniauskas 252) that resists the systematic condition of acculturation as a syncretic concoction that mollifies the acidity of difference in the name of a new and improved version of identity. In need of a new language that can describe a "world of unequal exchanges" (Stewart 42), we also invoke the history of the term "hybrid," its derogatory connotations of an adulterated identity that is fallen from an ideal purity and the racist implications of such a constructed binary between purity and hybridity, as these implications albeit developed and transformed into new or renewed binaries (civilized cultures versus terror cultures, native inhabitants versus immigrants, Christians versus Muslims), persist in the global matrix. In this light, the global hybrid is always already the attempt to represent (hybridity as a condition of exchange and transformation) what it envisions (the global hybrid as a "yet-to-come," to use Derrida's phrase) inspired by what it describes, namely, a global matrix constituting and constituted by a network of local narratives and experiences that cannot be metaphorically represented or even accurately analyzed. Hence, by "global hybrid" we attest to the ongoing and impossible to predict (or accurately to describe) changes and transformations in the political, cultural, ethnic and social dimensions of the worlds that come into contact and conflict with each other even---{)r especially-within the same nations. The community-in-the-making made by "these hybrid counterenergies" and "numerous anti-systemic hints and practices for collective human existence" (Said, Culture 335) that will cater to the idea of a selfcritical human community inspired by a literary community of subaltemity and exilic consciousness is the location of the praxis of humanism (its worldliness and secularity), the abode of its quest. Such praxis will provide a critical conscientiousness on this fate of being thrown together (thus producing its own interruptive myth and literature) and promote a participatory citizenship that does not crystallize the memory of belonging

'Another Insistence': Humanism And the Aporia Of Community

345

but instead confronts "the different modalities ofexclusion (social and thus political, for the two notions have never been truly separate)" (Balibar 76). The question is how this where of humanism will be realized. This impossible possibility is the task of critical thinking that should inspire constituencies to resist pre-emptive attacks and polemical discourses that revive brutal binaries and proliferate the "us/them" divide. In Judith Butler's words: If the humanities has a future as cultural criticism, and cultural criticism has a task at the present moment, it is no doubt to return us to the human where we do not expect to find it, in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense. We would have to interrogate the emergence and vanishing of the human at the limits of what we can know, what we can hear, what we can see, what we can sense. This might prompt us, affectively, to reinvigorate the intellectual process of critique, of questioning, of coming to understand the difficulties and demands of cultural translation and dissent, and to create a sense of the public in which oppositional voices are not feared, degraded or dismissed, but valued for the instigation to a sensate democracy they occasionally perform. (151)

In view of this future present of cultural criticism, we wish to see our reconstellation of Said's affirmation of a humanist praxis with Derrida's politics of friendship as a theoretically hybrid praxis that binds the question of the human with the quest of community and sustains the site of a critical analysis as infmitely open and in play. The forgetting of the question of the human has not obliterated its importance but instead accentuated the urgency of its question. The practice and praxis of critical thinking that involves the meticulous and attentive reading of texts is a way of encountering the question and its ruins if we-teachers, scholars, students, and readers-are to imagine, reinvent, and remake our communities not in the image that tradition and the myths of homogeneity and national insularity have afforded us, but in communion with a global hybridity that emerges from clashes, transgressions, crossings and encounters that our disparate realities have forged before us. If the Humanities has a future, then it is in its present, which calls for a close reading and critical understanding of the mythogenetic, fictional and historic processes that have solidified the origins of nations, cultures, and identities. This implies that the Humanities must take on the task of intensely educating constituencies on their mis-education in order for these constituencies to imagine themselves and their communities otherwise. The praxis of critical thinking can reconstellate literature, philosophy, social sciences and the arts for these other communities to be articulated and critically engaged in the name of the question of the human and its

346

Karavanta & Morgan

'Another Insistence': Humanism And the Aporia Of Community

abode. Such praxis will not be interdisciplinary by simply bringing together a number of disciplines but hybrid in inviting inter-critical practices that will transform original positions, methodologies and articulations. By being doubly accountable to the present and future, such critical praxis can sustain and enliven the question of the human in a hybrid theoretical space that will articulate and

Notes

bring into being (to liberate) the thought of a differential polity, a polity in which the dialogue that is the essential condition of our mortal being-with takes place not in the seductive paradisal realm to which it has, in fact, been strategically confined by liberal democracy, but in this unequal world, where imbalance of power-and injustice-always rules. (Spanos 206) Here we fmd appropriate what Chakrabarty beautifully invokes in his postscript of Provincializing Europe (46) as the "politics of despair": the politics that recognizes the imperative of working within its own impossible limitations for an impossible and yet desirable project. In Chakrabarty's case, the project is what he calls the "provincialization of Europe" that will strive to unconceal the complicity between European modernity, postcoloniality and globalizations and the conflicting and yet necessary relationship between violence an idealism that lie "at the heart of the process by which the narratives of citizenship and modernity come to find a natural home in history" (45). In a similar fashion, humanismclosely related to the construction of Europe as a hyperreality that cannot be escaped and whose palimpsest narrative cannot be easily deconstructed-ealls for such a politics of despair but also for a politics of location if in our return to humanism we are in quest of "a history that deliberately makes visible, within the very structure of its narrative forms, its own repressive strategies and practices, the part it plays in collusion with the narratives of citizenships in assimilating to the projects of the modem state all other possibilities of human solidarity" (45). Thus Derrida's affirmation of the inescapability of the metaphysical narrative, of the texture of our existence, and Said's insistence that we become vigilant readers of that text together reveal a promise and a hope for the political nature of criticism itself as an act of humanism; for it is deconstruction, the small rupture of this narrative provoked by a hybrid critical praxis, that will unconceal the repressive and calculative mechanisms of the narrative's construction so that the world(s) of our community may once again be interpreted and imagined as radically heterogeneous and hybrid-as it is lived.

347

I We are invoking Said's definition of the term in Orielltalism in which it is employed not just as a territorial but principally as an "ideological formation" that transcends its geographical boundaries to ideologically contaminate cultures, nations, and continents as the emblem of the Enlightenment ideals associated with rrogress and civilization. In The Rise of Eurocentrism, Vassilis Lambropoulos critically investigates the genealogy of these terms in relation to the classical roots of these ideals in Ancient Greece and Rome and questions the politics of the Enlightenment project intertwined with the project of imperialism. For an extended discussion on the interdependent relationship between the concept of the West brewed in Europe, its origins in the classical world, and colonization, also see William V. Spanos' America's Shadow: The Anatomy ofan Empire. 3 According to Hobsbawm, the invention of tradition is "essentially a process of formalization and ritualization" (4) that connects the past to the present with the purpose of establishing "social cohesion, institutions or relations of authority" and achieving "socialization" (9). This definition is the starting point of a deconstruction of tradition, as a construction transformed by the territorial and ideological needs of the state bound by its national agenda. 4 In the conclusion of The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon refers to another set of two Europes: the existing one that has founded and sustained the imperialist and colonialist project and U.S. America as a country modeled on the European tradition. Fanon analyzes the American paradigm as an example to be avoided for its mimetic restructuring of the Old-World values in the New World has devastated its land and inhabitants (the native and non-native populations of the country). He also warns the rising postcolonial communities against employing the European model in the reconstruction process in their attempt to secure the legitimacy and recognition of their societies by the western world. S In Race and the Enlightenment, Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze presents an interesting collection of extracts from a wide pool of philosophers and thinkers ranging from Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottfried Herder to Georges Leopold Cuvier and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. One of the extracts that the author includes in his reader is a definition of the Negro taken from the Encyclopaedia Britannica (first American edition, 1798), which ends as follows: "Vices the most notorious seem to be the portion of this unhappy race: idleness, treachery, revenge, cruelty, impudence, stealing, lying, profanity, debauchery, nastiness and intemperance, are said to have extinguished the principles of natural law, and to have silenced the reproofs of conscience. They are strangers to every sentiment of compassion, and are an awful example of the corruption of man when left to himself' (94). 6 In "The Ends of Man," in Margins of Philosophy, Jacques Derrida invokes the question of the ontological as articulated by Martin Heidegger's question of Being, which proposes a unity of Being "by means of the essential project of human-

348

Karavanta & Morgan

'Another Insistence': Humanism And the Aporia Of Community

reality" (116). As the translation of Heidegger's Dasein into "human-reality" demonstrates, the existentialist response to the question of Being has been a reduction of the question of being that affirms the essence of man as a point of departure rather than the object of a quest and thus, as Derrida suggests, is a verification of Heidegger's proposition that "every humanism remains metaphysical" (116). Sartre's "Existentialism is a Humanism" and Heidegger's. "Letter on Humanism" articulate the debate between an anthropocentric humanism • that gives priority to existence as defined by action (Sartre) and a restless, deconstructive humanism (Heidegger) in pursuit of the question of Being thatevades a conclusive and hence reductive representation of the human and remembers the incommensurable differences that the temporality of being disseminates against the fiction of the pure or superior identity. Redefining existence not as the source of action that is countable and thus accountable to an economy-such as the economy of the state or the market-but as "ek-sistence" (Heidegger 230) determined by the "ecstatic relation of the essence of man to the truth of Being" (236), Heidegger underlines the indissoluble and incommensurable relationship between beings and Being or the ontic and the ontological, existence and ek-sistence to counter the "oblivion of Being" (242) whose main symptom is "homelessness" as "the abandonment of Being by beings" (242) that is "coming to be the destiny of the world" (243). 7 This invokes Foucault's "repressive hypothesis," the result of a "'monumental history' finally intended to obscure the imperial will to power informing the 'free' discursive practices of modem humanism" (Spanos 66). 8 See Etienne Balibar's We, the People of Europe? for a further analysis of this subject and the imperative of transnational citizenship in a Europe with more open borders. 9 See Paolo Virno's A Grammar ofthe Multitude. 10 See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire and Multitude. II Both Bruce Robbins in his essay "Said and Secularism" that appears in this volume and Mustapha Marrouchi in Edward Said at the Limits emphasize Said's "effort" (Robbins) and "perseverance" (Marrouchi xiii) as one of Said's most ethically and politically important intellectual graces. See Robbins' essay for a more attentive reading of the connections of this concept to Said's work and his asistemic critical praxis. I Throughout his work, Said refuses to abide by the strict boundaries of a methodological or theoretical field. In the opening of Culture and Imperialism, he clarifies his commitment to an a-systemic critical praxis: "The supposed autonomy of works of art enjoins a kind of separation which, I think, imposes an uninteresting limitation that the works themselves resolutely will not make. Still, I have deliberately abstained from advancing a completely worked out theory of the connection between literature and culture on the one hand, and imperialism on the other. Instead, I hope the connections will emerge from their explicit places in the various texts, with the enveloping setting-empire-there to make connections with, to develop, elaborate, expand, or criticize" (14). J3 See Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses."

14 In After Empire, Gilroy also reproves the practice of humanism without the analytical tools that will retrieve the idea of exclusion (through race in his proposal) and will protect this practice from being impotent or disinterested bourgeois reflection (18) thus easily forgetting the "inability of the colonizer's humanitarianism to accommodate the humanity of the colonized" (17). 15 As Khalidi puts it, Said's work "establishes the idea of the basic humanity of the Palestinian people in the minds oflhe American public" (in Bove 153). 16 In "Edward Said's Humanism and American Exceptionalism after 9/11: An Interrogation" which appears in this volume, William V. Spanos offers a challenging reading that accounts for Aamir Mufti's inversion of the terms in the latter's analysis of Said's praxis of secular criticism. According to Spanos, this inversion is strategic to sustaining the power of critical secularism and its openness to the historical, political and social heterogeneity of the secular, which can operate like another universal without the support of a deconstructive critique that always already caters to the indissoluble relay of ontological differences. 17 In "The Almost Nothing of the Unpresentable," the interviewer says, "As regards the political field, you have never taken up noisy positions there; you have even practiced what you call a sort of withdrawal." In response, Derrida defends himself: "I could reply that I think of nothing else" (Points 86). 18 While some thinkers like Hardt and Negri celebrate the coming of Empire as the coming of a new age (see, Empire and Multitude) others like Spivak call this a hegemonic globalism whose processes are reducible to a "normative globality" (Outside 79). 19 In Precarious Life, Butler reads Levinas' ethics of face to explain the current technological effacement of the face that the representation of the face and its entrapment in an image produces. 20 In "Freedom from Domination in the Future," Said explains Hugh of St. Victor's lines as well as Auerbach's interest in them as a discussion related to "independence" such that "the universal truth of exile is not that one has lost that love or home, but that inherent in each is an unexpected, unwelcome loss" (Culture and Imperialism 336). This should be compared to Derrida's sense that the community's autoimmune response is not expected or conscious as described by J. Hillis Miller in "Derrida Enisled" in The Late Derrida. 21See Derrida's interview, "For a Justice to Come" with Lieven de Cauter; April 04, 2004; available online at www.brusselstribunal.org. Also, reprinted in the Derrida-Habermas Reader (2006), edited by Lasse Thomassen. Emphasis in quote added. 22 In a charming passage of self-disclosure, Derrida goes on to say that as a child he had always identified with the representation of heroes of the French Resistance who captured Germans officers and so forth. 23 We here follow Blanchot's definitions of the terms in The Writing of the Disaster. Care and responsibility are acts that involve the risk of transgressing one's boundaries to tum to and be with the radical other at the expense of the self, if necessary. Rather than "take care of' the other, the subject is called forth to care and be responsible "for" the other.

349

350

Karavanta & Morgan

In Death of a Discipline, Spivak also asks this question of the "place of the 'human' or 'humanism'" (26) and connects its pursuit to the role of comparative literature as a discipline that never CeaSeS to imagine the possibility of articulating and thus creating "collectivities" not on the basis of specific cultural foundations, often preconditioned by national agendas, but as variations of "the human family" 24

(27). 2S "We must (il faut) more than ever stand on the side of human rights. We need (il '. faut) human rights... [and] we must never prohibit the most radical questioning possible of all the concepts at work here: the humanity of man ...and then the. concepts of rights or law (droit), and even the concept of history" (Derrida, "Autoimmunity" 132). 26 "A 'philosopher' (actually I would prefer to say 'philosopher-deconstructor') would be someone who analyzes and then draws the practical and effective consequences of the relationship between our philosophical heritage and the structure of the still dominant juridico-political system that is so clearly undergoing mutation. A 'philosopher' would be one who seeks a new criteriology to distinguish between 'comprehending' and 'justifying'" ("Autoimmunity" 106).

Works Cited Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Lenin and Philosophy. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971. Apter, Emily. "Saidian Humanism," boundary 2, voUI, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 35. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 1989. Attridge, Derek. "Introduction. Derrida and the Questioning of Literature." Acts ofLiterature. New York & London: Routledge, 1992. 1-33. Balibar, Etienne. We, the People of Europe? Trans. James Swenson. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004. Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing ofthe Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Borradori, Giovanna. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Bove, Paul. Ed. Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000. Brah, Avtar & Annie E. Coombes. eds. Hybridity and its Discontents. London & New York: Routledge, 2000. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life. New York & London: Verso, 2004.

'Another Insistence': Humanism And the Aporia Of Community

351

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press 2000. Derrida, Jacques. Paper Machine. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. _. "Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides-a dialogue with Jacques Derrida." Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. _. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Trans. Mark Dooley & Michael Hughes. London & New York: Routledge, 2001. _. Of Hospitality. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. _. Politics ofFriendship. Trans. George Collins. New York: Verso, 1997. -. Spectres de Marx. Paris: Galilee, 1993. _. Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York & London: Routledge, 1992. _. "The Ends of Man." Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. _. "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas." Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Eliot, T.S. Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. London: Faber & Faber, 1973. Eze, Emmanuel, Chukwudi. Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York & London: Penguin Books, 1990. Gilroy, Paul. After Empire. Melancholia or Convivial Culture? Oxford: Routledge, 2004. Gourgouris, Stathis. "Transformation, Not Transcendence," boundary 2, vo1.31, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 55. Hardt, Michael & Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. _. Multitude. New York: Penguin Press, 2004. Heidegger, Martin. "Letter on Humanism." Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell, 1993. Hobsbawm, Eric & Terence Ranger. Ed. The Invention of Tradition. London: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Khalidi, Raishid I. "Edward W. Said and the American Public Sphere: Speaking Truth to Power." Edward Said and the Work of the Critic:

352

Karavanta & Morgan

Speaking Truth to Power. Ed. Paul Bove. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000. Kraniauskas, John. "Hybridity in a Transnational Frame: LatinAmericanist and Post-colonial Perspectives on Cultural Studies." Hybridity and its Discontents. Eds. Avtar Brah and Annie E. Coombes. New York: Routledge, 2000. Lambropoulos, Vassilis. The Rise of Eurocentrism. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1992. Levinas, Emmanue1. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alfonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Marrouchi, Mustapha. Edward Said at the Limits. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Miller, Hillis J. "Derrida Enisled" The Late Derrida. Ed. W.J.T. Mitchell and Arnold 1. Davidson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 30-58. Mufti, Aamir R. "Critical Secularism: A Reintroduction for Perilous Times," Critical Secularism, Ed. Aamir R. Mufti, a special issue of boundary 2, vo1.3!. 2 (2004): 1-9. Nancy, Jean-Luc. La Communaute Desoeuvree. Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1986. Said, Edward W. Power, Politics and Culture. Ed. Gauri Viswanathan. London: Bloomsbury, 2005. -. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Palgrave, 2004. - . Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. -. Representations ofthe Intellectual. London: Vintage, 1994. -. Edward Said: A Critical Reader. Ed. Michael Sprinkler, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. -. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 1991. - . The World, the Text. the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983. Spanos, William V. America's Shadow. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Spivak, Chakravorty Gayatri. Death ofa Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. -. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York & London: Routledge, 1993. Stewart, Charles. "Syncretism and Its Synonyms: Reflections on Cultural Mixture." Diacritics 29.3 (Fall 1999): 40-62. Vattimo, Gianni. The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture. (1985). Trans. Jon R. Snyder. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

,Another Insistence': Humanism And the Aporia Of Community

353

Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude. Trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito & Andrea Casson. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004.

Reconstellating Humanism and the Global Hybrid

CONTRIBUTORS

Joan Anim-Addo is Director of the Center for Caribbean Studies and a Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her publications in poetry, literary criticism and history include Longest Journey: A History of~ Black Lewisham (1995), Sugar, Spices and Human Cargo (1996), Haunted by History (Mango Publishing, 1998), Imoinda, Or She Who Will Lose Her Name (Universita di Trento, 2003), Janie: Cricketing Lady (Mango Publishig, 2006), Touching the Body (Mango Publishing, 2007) and I Am Black White Yellow: An Introduction to the Black Body in Europe (Mango Publishing, 2007, with Suzanne Scafe). She co-ordinates the "Black Body in Europe" research network. Giovanna Covi is an Associate Professor of American Literature and Gender Studies at the University of Trento and a founding member of the Societa Italiana delle Lelterate. She is the editor of Modernist Women Race Nation (Mango Publishing, 2005), Critical Studies on the Feminist Subject (Universita di Trento, 1998), and Voci femminili caraibiche e interculturalita (Universita di Trento, 2003) and the author of Jamaica Kincaid's Prismatic Subjects: Making Sense of Being in the World (Mango Publishing, 2003). Samir Dayal is an Associate Professor of English at Bentley College, Waltham, Massachusetts. He is the author of Resisting Modernity: COlmternarratives of Nation and Masculinity, the editor, with an introduction, of Julia Kristeva's Crisis ofthe European Subject and the coeditor of Global Babel: Questions ofDiscourse and Communication in a Time of Globalization (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007). He has published several essays in Amerasia, Angelaki, Postmodern Culture, and other journals. Stathis Gourgouris teaches Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institutions of Modern Greece (Stanford University Press, 1996) and Does Literahlre Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford University Press, 2003).

355

Mina Karavanta is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of English Studies at the University of Athens. Some of her recent essays have appeared in mosaic, The Journal ofContemporary Thought, and European Journal ofEnglish Studies, and collection of essays such as Global Babel: Questions of Discourse and Communication in a Time of Globalization, (Eds. Samir Dayal & Margueritte Murphy), Theory as Variation, (Eds. R.Radhakrisnan, Nayak K. Kishori et.all), and others. She is currently coauthoring a book on Jacques Derrida and the political quest of the Literary with Dr. Nina Morgan. Vassilis Lambropoulos is the C.P.Cavafy Professor of Modem Greek at the University of Michigan, teaching in the Departments of Classical Studies and Comparative Literature. His authored books are Literature as National Institution: Studies in the Politics of Modern Greek Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1988), The Rise ofEurocentrism: Anatomy of Interpretation (Princeton University Press, 1993), and The Tragic Idea (Gerald Duckworth & Company, 2006). He has co-edited the volumes The Text and its Margins: Poststructuralist Approaches to Twentieth-Century Greek Literature (Pella Publishing, 1985, with Margaret Alexiou) and Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: An Introductory Anthology (SUNY Press, 1987, with David Miller), and a special issue of the journal October, "The Humanities as Social Technology" (1990, with Eugene Holland). He edited "Ethical Politics," a special issue of the journal South Atlantic Quarterly (Duke University Press, 1996). Tabea Linhard teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her PhD in Romance Studies from Duke University and is the author of Fearless Women in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War (University of Missouri Press, 2005). Her current research involves the Mediterranean, and she is working on a book on Jewish culture in contemporary Spain. Jutta Gsoels-Lorensen is an Assistant Professor of German, English and Comparative Literature at Penn State University, Altoona College. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University. She has published articles on the work of Jacob Lawrence, Elfriede Jelinek, Barbara Honigmann and Ie thi diem thuy and is currently working on a book on second generation remembrance. Robert Marzec is an Associate Professor of English in the Department of English at Purdue University and the Associate Editor of Modern Fiction

356

Contributors

Studies. He is the founding editor of crossings, and the book editor of American Regional Cultures: the Mid-Atlantic Region, (Greenwood Press 2004). Author of several essays on postcolonial studies, comparative literature and theory, he is also the author of An Ecological and Postcolonial Study of Literature: From Daniel Defoe to Salman Rushdie (palgrave MacMillan, 2007).

Efterpi Mitsi is an Assistant Professor of English in the Faculty of English Studies at the University of Athens, Greece. She has published in ~ the fields of early modem literature, comparative literature and travel literature. Recent publications include essays on Sidney, early modem travel and British travelers to Greece in a variety of journals. She has coedited In the Country of the Moon: British Women Travelers to Greece 1718-1932, a collection of women's travel writing on Greece, (Estia, 2005, with Vassiliki Kolocotroni) and Women Writing Greece: Essays on Hellenism, Orientalism and Travel (Rodopi, forthcoming, with Vassiliki Kolokotroni). Nina Morgan is an Associate Professor of English in the Department of English of Kennesaw State University, where she teaches critical theory and world literatures. Her work has been published in Japan, India, Spain and the USA. Dr. Morgan currently serves as an editor of the Journal of Transnational American Studies. Together with Dr. Karavanta, she is writing a book on Jacques Derrida and the political quest of the Literary, entitled, Derridean Antigones: Deconstruction, the Literary and the Question ofthe Political. R. Radhakrishnan is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), Theory in an Uneven World (Blackwell 2003), and History, The Human, And The World Between (Duke University Press, 2006), and When is the Political? (forthcoming). He is the translator of contemporary Tamil fiction into English, and author of a volume of poems in Tamil, Moved, But not in Time. His numerous essays and articles on theory, poststructuralism, postcoloniality, and diasporic studies have been published in a variety ofjournals and collections. Bruce Robbins is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of numerous essays that have been published in a variety journals and several books among which are Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (NYU Press, 1999) and Secular

Reconstellating Humanism and the Global Hybrid

357

Vocation: Intellectual. Professionalism, Culture (Verso, 1993), and coeditor of Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation and Intellectuals: Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 1990), Aesthetics, Academia (University of Minnesota Press, 1998) and Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State (Princeton University Press, 2007).

William V. Spanos is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University. He is the founding editor of boundary 2, and his numerous books include The End of Education (University of Minnesota Press, 1990), Heidegger and Criticism (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), The Errant Art of MobyDick (Duke University Press, 1995), America's Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), American Exceptionalism and the Age of Globalization (SUNY University Press, 2008) and The Legacy ofEdward W. Said (Illinois University Press, forthcoming).

Reconstellating Humanism and the Global Hybrid

INDEX

Adorno, Theodor, 18,92,95,97, 107-110 aesthetics, 162, 164-5, 168-170, 172 Agamben, Giorgio, 180, 190, 280, 284,296,300 agon, 159, 165, 167, 172 Ahmad, Aijaz, 145 Ali, Tari, 148 Althusser, Louis, 24, 27, 38, 48-9, 180, 184, 332, 350 Anidjar, Gil, 141-6, 148, 153 Anim-Addo, Joan, 273-4, 297-8, 301,303 animality, 175, 180, 187-8, 190-2, 196 antihumanism, 28, 29, 142, 147, 223,226,233,236,241,246; ethical, 221, 228, 231, 233, 235-6, 246 Apter, Emily, 8, 204, 211 Auerbach, Erich, 29-31, 33-8, 50, 52 Azar, Michael, 223, 230, 235 Balibar, Etienne, 6, 328, 344-5, 347 Bearden, Romare & Harry Henderson, 54, 58-9, 63, 69-70, 76 Benjamin, Walter, 186-7 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 43-4, 50-1 Bhabha, Homi, 48, 111,224,232, 241-2,247 Bilgrami, Akeel, 60, 146, 148 Blanchot, Maurice, 351 Brathwaite, Kamau, 265 Brecht, Bertolt, 158-172 Brennan, Timothy, 112 Buruma, Ian 146

Butler, Judith, 280-4, 288-9, 294, 296,297,347 Buttigieg, Joseph, 19 Canclini, Garcia Nestor, 6,7,8 Castro, Americo, 122, 131, 133, 135 Cavarero, Adriana, 283-4, 294 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 112,253-4, 271,327,348 Cheah, Pheng, 7 Childers, William, 125-6 Cinca, Pinos, 131 Clark-Lewis, Elizabeth, 67, 72 Clark, Robert L.A., 117 Collini, Stefan, 140 Covi, Giovanna, 264, 267, 270 colonization, 104,106,314,317, 319,323,324 colonized subject, 222-3, 232, 237 community, 313, 320-2, 329-333, 337-342,344-6,348 concurrencY,2,5,8,18,328 convivencia, 2,10, 116, 127-129, 133, 135 contrapuntal, 329, 331-2, 342 cosmopolitanism, 144 critical secularism, 32, 33 Curtis, Barry, 120-2 Davies, Tony, 203-4 decidability, 31, 320-2; undecidability, 308, 310-2, 316 decolonization, 220, 226, 228-9, 233-4, 238-240 deconstruction, 26, 43-45, 103, 107, 109,312-4,324,329,333,336-7, 343,348-9 deconstructive praxis, 4

democracy, 159, 167-171, 195-6, 222,229,242 Defoe, Daniel, 317, 324 Derrida, Jacques, 1-8, 13-4, 16-7, 24-6,36,47,95,100,103,111-2, 117, 180, 188,252,278, 307-9, 311-2,343-8; "Differance", 2767; "The Ends of Man", 56, 77-9; O/Hospitality, 341; Politics 0/ Friendship, 286, 338, 340-1, 347; Specters 0/ Marx, 133, 134, 174, 313-5; "Violence and Metaphysics", 329 dividua (la), 276, 286-9, 298-9, 30 I; dividue (Ie), 291-2, 294-5, 297, 300 effort, 139-140, 147-151, 153-154 enclosure, 316-8, 320, 323 Enlightenment, 176-8,253-4,257-9, 261, 268-9, 327 Equiano, Olaudah, 252, 255, 257, 259-260,262-3,265,267,271 Eurocentrism, 233-4, 237, 240, 242 exceptionalism, 24, 41, 42, 45, 47, 53 exile, 120, 121, 130 existentialism, 233 Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi, 233-4, 244,254,257-9,349 Fanon, Frantz, 220-246, 327, 349 feminism, 276-9, 283, 297-8 Foucault, Michel, 24-7, 32, 47-9, 90,95,98-9,103, 106-7, 109, 111 Freud, Sigmund, 191-2 friendship, 3, 338-341, 344, 347 Gates, Henry Louis Jr., 68, 71 gendered subject, 276, 279-0, 283-4, 286-8, 291, 297 geopolitics, 307-310, 315-6, 319, 322 Gilroy, Paul, 351 Glissant, Edouard, 286 global hybrid, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 17, 18,38,341-6

359

global policy, 41-6 global! globalization, 1-18,94, 103, 116,132,154,179,234,241-2, 254, 256, 260-8, 271-2, 282, 284, 286,300,311,314,316,323-4 Gourgouris, Stathis, 106-7, 333 Grass, GUnter, 160-8, 172 Great Migration, 58, 65, 67, 69, 70 Greenblatt, Stephen, 207 Greene, Carroll, 60-4 Griffin, Farah Jasmine, 67 Guha, Ranajit, 107 Gunn, Giles, 151-2 Hall, Stuart, 222, 235-6, 242 Haraway, Donna, 284-6, 293, 297-8, 301 Harlem community, 55, 69 Harvey, William R., 56 Hazlitt, William, 172 Hegel, G.W.F., 233, 235 Heidegger, Martin, 97,107-9, III, 175,177,183-7,191,195,313-4, 317,323,326-7,335,342 Hills, Patricia, 55-6, 62, 80-2 Hine, Darlene Clark, 66-7, 82; & Kathleen Thompson, 68-9 history, 176, 179, 181-2, 187, 189, 194 Holland, Juanita Marie, 66, 72 Holland, Patrick, 116, 134 hospitality, 3, 340- I Hovsepain, Nubar, 153 hubris, 164, 167-8 humanism, 1-21,24-26,28-33,3740,47-48; 56-60, 64, 67-70, 74, 76-79,78, 90-93, 96-107, 199205,210-212,223,225-6,230-5, 242, 246, 252-6, 260, 271, 327-9, 332-5, 337, 339-343, 346-8; and democratic praxis, 1-21, 158, 167, 171,175-185,188,190,194-6; European, 220-1,228; and the human subject, 2, 57,59, 60, 62, 64,65,70,74,77-9; literary humanism, 94, 269; new

360 humanism, 92; new human, 252, 265; planetary, 276; post-western humanism, 261, 266, 268, 270; secular humanism, 124 humanitas, 185, 195, 199 humanity, 199-201,210,213,279, 287 humanities, 276, 278-284, 289, 300 human rights, 276, 279, 280, 283, 293,295 human subject, 281-5, 287-9, 291, 294 Huntington, Samuel P., 38,43-9 Hussein, Abdirahman, 148-9 hybridity, 2, 6, 7,17,341,347 hybridization, 2, 6, 7, 8 imperialism, I, 3, 6, 8, I I, 24, 28, 35,39,44,89,124,130,133,135, 149,152,154,178,204,212,220, 253,284-5,312,322,324,327332,334,342,344 inhabitancy, 316-9, 321-4 intellectual, 140-144, 148-150, 153154,210-3 Kaplan, Caren, 141 Karlstrom, Paul J., 55-6 Kinney, Arthur F., 200, 209 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 20 I Lacan, Jacques, 223, 232, 237, 2445 Lakowski, Romuald Ian, 209 Lawrence, Jacob, 54-82 Lazarus, Neil, 227, 239, 241-2 Levinas, 339 Lorensen, Yutta, 66,76 Makdisi, George, 175 Manifest Destiny, 35, 41 Marin, Louis, 208 Marx, Karl, 177, 180-7,228-9,234, 240,242,245 Marxism, 234, 240 Mbembe, Achille, 221,225

Index

Reconstellating Humanism and the Global Hybrid Menocal, Maria Rosa, 125, 128-9, 131,133,135 metaphysics, I, 10, 12, 14, 19,28, 57, 183-5, 187, 313-4, 329, 333 Miles, Keith, 163 Moore, Shirley Ann, 67 More, Sir Thomas, 200-213 Morrison, Toni, 267, 290, 292-3, 296-7 Moryson, Fynes, 199-200,208 Mufti, Aamir, 3, 32-3, 210,336,351 Nandi, Ashis, 238 nationalism, 220, 235, 239-240, 242 neocolonialism, 220, 233-4, 241 Nethersole, Reingard, 254-4, 266270 Nirenberg, David, 127-8, 133-5 Nixon, Rob, 143 palimpsest, 123-126, 132 Patton, Sharon F., 55 philology, 158, 167-8, 171 Pickar, Gertrud Bauer, 164 Pincombe, Mike, 200 postcolonial, 4, 220-6, 232-3, 238240,242,311-2,317,320 poststructuralism, 25-29, 40-47, 97, 148,154 Powell, Richard 1., 54, 63, 80, 81 Prince, Mary, 260-8 psychoanalysis, 243, 244, 245, 249 reconstellation, 2, 5, 9, 17, 18, 19 race, 256-7, 259, 261-2, 266-7, 286, 297 racialism, 232, 234, 238, 243 racism, 222 Radhakrishnan, R., 7, 9, 10, 12 "radical other", 252, 258, 262, 270 Renaissance, 200-5, 212 resistance, 167-8, 170-1 revolution, 161-9, 175 Robbins, Bruce, 19,93, III, 142, 150,210 Ronell, Avital, 299-300

Rushdie, Salman, 3, 131-2 Saglia, Diego, 119, 136 Said, Edward, 1-5,8-17,87-91, 108-110, 119, 120, 124, 129, 139, 147,152-4,158,167-172,180, 195,200,203-4,252,266,276, 286,288,294,305,308,328, 336-9; "Andalusia's Journey", 115-8,121,8,132-3; Culture and Imperialism, 64-5, 102-3, 126, 285,323,329-331,334,344; Freud and the Non-European, 101- 104, 107; "History, Literature, Geography", 277, 3156; Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 32-42, 57-8, 60, 68, 715,77-9,92-100,105-6,119,120, 124,129,176-8,202,212-3,332, 334, 336, 343; "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community", 278; Orientalism, 142,146,151,334; "Palestine: Memory, Invention and Space", 149, 150; Power, Politics and Culture, 40,46-8, 329-330; Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 143-4, 175; Representations ofthe Intellectual, 210-212; "Traveling Theory Reconsidered", 130, 131; The World, the Text and the Critic, 99,144,148,210 Samir, Amin, 14 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 98-9, III

361

secular criticism 3, 4, 26, 33-3, 37, 329-330 secularism, 141-147, 150-154,3303,336,341-2 slavery, 74,-5,81,221,227,231, 252-8, 260-4, 272-3 Spanos, William V., 49-51, 348 specter, 106, 117-119, 133 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 20, 70-1,281,284,288-9,292,294, 300 territorialization, 312, 314, 322 theory, 308-9,311 Touraine, Alain, 20 I tourism, 119-120, 124, 132 travel, 115, 116 traveling theory, 119, 129, 130 Turner, Elizabeth Hutton, 54-5 unworldliness, 29 utopia, 201-5; Utopia (More's) 207212 Vico, Gianballista, 199-203 Virilio, Paolo, 322 Wheat, Ellen Harkins, 54-5, 57, 59, 68-9,78 Williams, Raymond, 27, 91, 99,110 woman migrant, 60, 65, 68, 70, 74, 78, 79 worldliness, 26-27, 33, 87-88, 97, 150,153 Yoram, Hanan, 204