Writing Diaspora in the West: Intimacy, Identity and the New Marginalism

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Writing Diaspora in the West

10.1057/9780230233843 - Writing Diaspora in the West, Peter McCarthy

10.1057/9780230233843 - Writing Diaspora in the West, Peter McCarthy

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Intimacy, Identity and the New Marginalism

Peter McCarthy

10.1057/9780230233843 - Writing Diaspora in the West, Peter McCarthy

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Writing Diaspora in the West

© Peter McCarthy 2009

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–21887–1 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–21887–3 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

10.1057/9780230233843 - Writing Diaspora in the West, Peter McCarthy

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For Clare

10.1057/9780230233843 - Writing Diaspora in the West, Peter McCarthy

10.1057/9780230233843 - Writing Diaspora in the West, Peter McCarthy

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction

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1 First Person Reflection: Origins of the Marginal Disposition A mad aggregate of doctrines, or the revised new syllabus All I want is to enter my house justified 2 Of Home and Hearth: Maps, Histories and Territorial Claims I am in anguish in order to flee it The truth has two faces ... A road map for marginalism? For my country’s good A compote of racism and ethnic slur in a marginalist jus 3 The Subject Missing: Erasure and the Reflexive Margin A cloud of representations Circling the margins of becoming The grey zone, or intimacy’s denial It is all a recording, really? Is anybody home?

1 7 13 23 31 37 44 47 53 60 63 69 77 81 86

4 Conflation, Contradiction and the Colonized Mind Curiously interdependent territories The marginalist poetics of erasure Let’s not talk about that The centre of the margin Figures in a landscape?

89 91 95 99 104 109

5 The Curious Heimat: Fetishism, Rupture, Boundary The logical small change, intimacy’s measure Everyone’s lookin’ for strange

115 116 121

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Contents

Contents

The imaginary geography of the marginalist The Mohammedan trauma of Edward W. Said The sepulchre of the margins The new propaganda

124 132 134 136

Notes

140

References

163

Index

175

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I wish to thank a number of friends, colleagues and new acquaintances whose generosity, both intellectual and otherwise, has been instrumental in seeing this project to fruition: Mark Mantle for the knowledge and insight he brings to the geopolitical machinations of South East Asia and the Middle East and the Western literary canon; Noel King for his critical insights into film, literature and narratology and the part they play in cultural theory (and to both for their enduring support and incisive, contributory polemics); Stephen Muecke and Horst Ruthrof for their early and ongoing encouragement; Lara Schrijver for her simultaneously warm and critical ear and editorial support; Natascha Drubek-Meyer and Sven Spieker for their support and gentle urging; and Louis Nowra and Vincent Ward for their inspired vision and generous spirit. I would also like to thank Theo van Leeuwen, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney, who has provided invaluable support in my role there as Research Associate. I sign the usual waiver that the views expressed are neither necessarily nor likely to be those of the above. Heartfelt thanks go to my family for their unconditional support and understanding of a certain absence during this undertaking, especially my wife Clare who hasn’t once faltered. Excerpts from the poetry and prose of Pier Palo Pasolini have been reproduced: ‘The PCI to the Young!! (Notes in Verse for a Prose Poem Followed by an “Apology”)’ reprinted with permission from Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barrett (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2005), 150–1 © New Academia Publishing, LLC; ‘A Desperate Vitality’ reprinted with permission from Pier Paolo Pasolini, Selected Poems, trans. Norman MacAfee and Luciano Martinengo (London: John Calder, 1989), 173 © Alma Books Ltd – Oneworld Classics Ltd. Excerpts from Peter Handke’s Sommerlicher Nachtrag zu einer winterlichen Reise are reproduced with permission from Peter Handke, Abshied des Träumers vom Neunten Land/Eine winterliche Reise zu den Flüssen Donau, Save, Morawa und Drina oder Gerechtigkeit für Serbien/Sommerlicher Nachtrag zu einer winterlichen Reise (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998), 249–50 © Suhrkamp Verlag. Parts of this work have been published previously and appear here with varying degrees of modification. ‘ “Marginalist Criticism”: An Infantile Disorder?’ formed the basis of this book and was published in ix

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Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

Symploké Special Issue: Theory Trouble 11(1–2) (2003): 167–82 and appears here with the permission of the University of Nebraska Press © Symploké 2003. A modified part of Chapter 2 first appeared as ‘Chasing the White Rabbit or, Depth and Surface in the “Real” World/De jacht op het witte konijn, of: Diepgang en oppervlaktein de “echte” wereld’, Oase 59 (Autumn 2002): 22–35, published by NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, and is reproduced here with permission. A version of a subsection of Chapter 2 first appeared as ‘The Truth is Two Faced: Godard at the Margins of Bad Faith’ in ARTMargins (www.artmargins.com), 18 October 2007, and is reproduced here with permission. Finally, I would like to express my appreciation to Christabel Scaife, Commissioning Editor for Culture & Media Studies at Palgrave Macmillan, for her advice and patient attention to my many requests during the production of this work. Of course, any and all inadequacies in the task fall to me alone.

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You shall go down into the world, and you shall be innocent, gentle, well-balanced and faithful, you shall have an infinite capacity to obey and an infinite capacity to rebel. You shall be pure. Therefore, I curse you. Pier Paolo Pasolini ‘A Desperate Vitality’ (1964) Let us now move to consider the margins (one can just as well say the silent, silenced center), says Gayatri Spivak, and the paradox is germane. Spivak here is mid-polemic, her struggle with two of the angels of French théorie haute – Foucault and Deleuze – as they mark out those margins by means of what she calls an ‘epistemic violence and imperialist law and education,’1 and already the gloves are off. The strangely normative and even imperious stance of Foucault and Deleuze is evinced in the relatively unguarded musings of a recorded conversation between them in 1972 in which, she argues, the theoretical chatter and verbal slippage between the two Western intellectuals gives up their ideological game, exposing them, she strongly suggests, as frauds. Spivak opens her critique of the intellectuals in question by pointing to their tendency to convenient, universalizing concepts and, despite their otherwise declarative positioning as radicals, to ‘systematically ignore the question of ideology and their own implication in intellectual and economic history’ and further, she observes, that neither ‘seems aware that the intellectual within socialized capital, brandishing concrete experience, can help consolidate the international division of labor’. She tunes in on a sense of disavowal of such radical positioning by dint of the banality and ease of the counterhegemonic rhetoric that flows between them and, worse, a certain genuflection and bad faith levelled at the very subjects of their discourse: the workers, the oppressed. ‘The invocation of the workers’ struggle is baleful in its very innocence,’ she argues, ‘it is incapable of dealing with global capitalism’ both at its Centre and its Periphery: ‘Why should such occlusions,’ she rightly asks, ‘be sanctioned in precisely those intellectuals who are our best prophets of heterogeneity and the Other?’2

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Introduction

Introduction

Despite their apparent refusal, as theorists, to identify with the subject of the workers’ struggle, they appear to have no problem locating the subject of that struggle within their own cosy rhetoric and thereby identifying with the subject of the workers’ struggle. She picks out a certain anxiety for the intellectual to prove that ‘intellectual labor is just like manual labor’ while at the same time positing that ‘no “theorizing intellectual ...” can represent “those who act or struggle”.’ But as they speak, they deign to give the worker a voice – they can speak, they know their lot, they are oppressed but they have it in them to organize, to form alliances, and so on – while avowedly and disingenuously denying their own. They represent the worker, despite their protestations to the contrary. ‘These philosophers will not entertain the thought of constitutive contradiction – that is where they admittedly part company with the Left.’3 They put themselves in the picture and the contradictions are breathtaking. Spivak, herself a burgher of the Non-Resident Indian (NRI) community in the West, is, however, harsh on this kind of subaltern identification, by Western intellectuals and others. Elsewhere she had argued that the ‘putative centre welcomes selective inhabitants of the margin in order better to exclude the margin’4 and on this count she already has Deleuze and Foucault nailed. But here too, she puts herself in the picture, in this instance at least, declaring her hand as something of a comprador intellectual and, just perhaps, a socialized Brahman pundit. She has no truck, apparently, with what she calls the ‘banality of leftist intellectuals’ lists of self-knowing, politically canny subalterns,’ arguing that, in this banal representation of the subaltern, the intellectuals in question represent themselves as simply transparent. She is also rightly dismissive of what she has called ‘the hyperbolic admiration ... or pious guilt that today is the mark of a reverse ethnocentrism’.5 While she concedes that to ignore the sociopolitical and discursive position of the subaltern is tantamount to the perpetuation of imperialism, we can see that the intellectuals’ critical attention to the subject position of the subaltern, the anthropologized Other, needs to be more than a simplistic identification with that subject position. She seemingly comes close here to Sartre when, writing of the rise of the colonized intellectual in the time of Fanon, he mouthed their lament in the face of the putatively rational First World: ‘You are making us into monstrosities; your humanism claims we are at one with the rest of humanity but your racist methods set us apart.’6 But Spivak is referring to fellow travellers, critics and scholars avowedly committed to the renunciation of such First World rationalism and hegemony in these more modern

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times. When Sartre looked into the mirror, it was Fanon who was staring back – when Spivak looks, it is Deleuze and Foucault. The discourse under Spivak’s scrutiny is based on psychoanalytic and deconstructive theories of a decentred subject, a subject that conducts its play at the margins, a subject who already subsists in a certain exile. But, while this subject is defined by its very heterogeneity, the very same subject can only exist by means of a homogeneous construction – the search for a tangible, perhaps lost or originary ground on which it might stand. So, the actual, latent project of the intellectual in question is to find a centred subject, which can only be effected by the narrative construction of an alien otherness and a retrograde nostalgia. It is here that a serious intellectual, existential and political problem obtains. Spivak targets the very squires of the theorizing she holds so dear, exposes their bad faith and intellectual affectation and both sets them against any proposition of a real critique of the international division of labour and exposes the very real possibility that their rhetoric serves to silence the subaltern as much as the hegemon itself. Her critique extends to the theoretical underpinnings of the Subaltern Studies group – of which she would be one – and its project to restore the voice of the subaltern, to reclaim some declarative space of resistance from the Imperium. This was a difficult, if not doomed, enterprise from the beginning (and one, at least in part, recognized by the group), its historiographical schooling not quite up to the task of undoing all the forces that stifled the voices of subalternity. Not least of these were the forces of a postcolonial, neonationalist elitism that stood to gain from the continued silence of the subaltern, and while Spivak condemned this Indian élite as ‘at best native informants for first-world intellectuals interested in the voice of the Other’ she adds, forcefully, that ‘the colonized subaltern subject is irretrievably heterogeneous.’7 Over the clamour of such heterogeneity, the subaltern subject and any possible subjective vocalization of their experience would be that merely ‘represented’ or channelled – and for her, importantly, gendered – by self-serving indigenous intellectuals. Against the Subaltern Studies group’s optimism that a ‘politics of the people’ (Guha) would emerge from the ‘circuit of colonial production.’8 Spivak was less sanguine, posing instead the power of a politics of the indigenous élite, the power of their voice and the continued recognition of their ‘representation’ for the West, proving that the voice of the subaltern was indeed irretrievable: the subaltern cannot speak, at least not in a manner unmediated by politically interested forces, both internal and external to their world.9

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Introduction

Gramsci, theorizing this very irretrievability of the oppressed, argued that ‘the history of subaltern social classes is necessarily fragmented and episodic .... In reality, even when they appear triumphant, the subaltern groups are merely anxious to defend themselves.’10 That the position of the subaltern is defensive is not surprising – all subjectivity is necessarily defensive – that their defence should be against the thrust of a simplistic and intellectually impoverished chic of an institutionalized and inverted victimhood most certainly is. Again speaking on Fanon, Sartre reminds us that ‘colonial administrators are not paid to read Hegel and for that matter they didn’t read much of him but they don’t need a philosopher to tell them that uneasy consciences get caught up in their own contradictions.’11 Deleuze and Foucault – and their theoretical progeny at the interface of poststructuralism and postcolonialism – are riding on the coat-tails of their decentred other as a means to rationalize their own existence as élitist provocateurs. In proposing to write the margins (by which subsists and endures a litany of human travesties) these intellectuals of heterogeneity in fact efface the experience of the truly dispossessed. They are in fact writing an experience that cannot be had from the position from which they write. The existential casting of the subject as the abstracted, alienated and parenthetical other is one thing (legitimate philosophical grist, perhaps) but the fact it has been dubiously parlayed into the fetishized experience of the subaltern and leached into the voyeuristic economy of the liberal intellectual is simply obscene. ‘The clearest available example of such epistemic violence,’ writes Spivak, ‘is the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other. This project is also the asymmetrical obliteration of the trace of that Other in its precarious Subject-ivity.’12 So what happens when the new postcolonial administrators of the margins do read Hegel? Or worse, a Hegel lost in the lures of some overdetermined deconstructive discourse? Here the contradictions may be less than visible. Robert Young rightly points out Spivak’s potential role in the propagation of a certain ‘violence’ of her own, despite her apparently earnest critique. In her own depictions of the English colonizer riding imperiously over the land and horizons of the Indian natives she appears to establish a ‘relation between administrator and native [that] operates through an apparently unproblematic polarity ... This raises an immediate and serious question,’ he writes, ‘namely to what extent does Spivak create the very homogenized positions that she wishes to attack? To what extent does she require totalization for the production of her own “epistemic violence”?’13 While she is avowedly aware of this

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potential, her positioning is indeed worthy of consideration. She lauds the project of heterogeneity, adverting to its imperious contradictions along the way, but then sets herself up in a contradiction of her own. In her critique, or at least mobilization of representation and its role in her own colonizers of the intellect and its fetishistic establishment or ‘worlding’ of the Third World, she does indeed get caught in the same epistemic and ontological travesty of which she accuses her subjects. The touts of ‘heterogeneity’ in fact operate from a position of a fundamental and necessary homogenization; their apparent inclusivity is a means to get in close, to close the distance, to indeed ‘obliterate’ the very difference they would otherwise seem to evangelize. Spivak too is subject to this homogenizing force that she wishes to expose, her own universalizing language serving to establish a dubious positionality for herself on some reflexive ground between her two prophets. A certain self-effacement serves her argument well – by putting herself in the picture, by simultaneously critiquing her subjects and aligning herself with their theoretical enterprise, she outwardly allows for an appropriate distance from her subjects while effortlessly forging her own position as the truly critical one. She has an each way bet. In a controversial and incisive critique of Spivak and the theoretical fashion she would come to epitomize, Terry Eagleton homes in on what has become something of a postcolonial theoretical device: ‘There must exist somewhere a secret handbook for post-colonial critics, the first rule of which reads: “Begin by rejecting the whole notion of postcolonialism” ... It is remarkable how hard it is to find an unabashed enthusiast for the concept among those who promote it,’ he argues. ‘The idea of the post-colonial has taken such a battering from postcolonial theorists that to use the word unreservedly of oneself would be rather like calling oneself Fatso ...’14 While Eagleton’s insight is accurate – adverting perhaps to the early and disdainful reception of Said’s work among scholars in Middle East and Islamic studies; the lineage is traceable to Spivak’s tiers-mondiste pimps and her own disquisition on intellectual ‘authenticity’ and positionality – the attractions of postcolonial theory, and Spivak’s theoretical ruminations in particular, for an entire generation of cultural theorists and their propagation of an entirely new one has proved the enterprise as palpable and popular as ever. Indeed, since the renascence of the neo-con during the 1990s and their veritable institution post-September 11 – Iraq, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, the practice of ‘rendition’ would likely be their symptom – the rhetorical flourishes of postcolonial theory have been flying off the shelves

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Introduction

of Western bookstores in what can be seen only as a major liberal counteroffensive. But this enterprise begs more questions than it answers: why, precisely, have avowedly progressive intellectuals and academics institutionalized Third-Worldism as a putatively critical approach to the new international division of labour? How has critical inquiry been subjected to such bastardization and bad faith and who serves to gain from such a movement? Counter to the self-serving minoritarian disposition of an intellectual expressed in a subject position that finds itself at this circuit of the margins, I pose here that same subject as the product of a confounding contradiction between an existential homeland and the margins of that very homeland. A subject, that is, steeped in the same quotidian experience as the rest of us. The homeland is the fantasy, the outland its means. And doubtless, Spivak – the star among the new canon – was on to this reflexive manoeuvre (if indeed an accomplice in its institution) very early in her stellar career. While the subject exists tenuously in a certain metastability (as Sartre would have had it) – stable enough, that is, to gain a foothold on the world before it but subject to its vicissitudes – it nonetheless finds its roots in the relative stability of a truly metaphysical and narrative homeland: the subject of modern self-consciousness – arguably the endgame of Romantic literature and the bastard child of existential philosophy. As Levinas teases out Hegel: ‘Alterity is possible only starting from me.’15 This is the projection of a necessarily grounded and homely consciousness that defines the marginal only by its very centred and metaphysical construct. It is precisely these metaphysical, structural and narrative bounds by which the subject is defined – the identitarian subject: nonreflexive, apparently non-contradictory, ethnically established, home and hosed. As Adorno subtly put it, this subject is the ‘supposition of identity ... the ideological element of pure thought ... but hidden in it is also the truth moment of ideology, the pledge that there should be no contradiction, no antagonism’.16 But this truth moment of ideology, of the subjective homeland, is simultaneously the bedrock of a constitutive exile – the product of fantasy, the projection of a subjective homeland onto the various margins of discourse, history and geography (narrative bounds) – the essential terrain of the marginal subject which, in relatively recent times, has become the height of intellectual fashion. These narrative bounds just may be the ‘minor literature’ that Deleuze and Guattari argued ‘doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language,’ and, they aver, ‘the first characteristic

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of minor literature ... is that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization.’17 I would argue that the major language (the normative, the dominant culture – the Centre – call it what you will) has indeed spawned a minority canon, effecting its own coefficient of territorialization in the groves of Academe, and elsewhere. A paradox is nigh – High Tea at low table. Writing of the fast times of independent Hollywood filmmaking during the early 1970s, Peter Biskind observes the kind of fashion and culture I have in mind. He writes of the courting of the Black Panthers and their leader Huey Newton by a smart clique of new Hollywood entrepreneurs, Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider and Steve Blauner – the famed BBS team behind Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) and something of an independent New Wave in American cinema – and the extent to which they were in each other’s pockets. ‘Some Panthers up in Oakland thought Huey had gone Hollywood,’ writes Biskind, ‘that his easy access to Schneider’s money and cocaine were distracting him from the struggle. Conversely, it was easy to see Schneider’s infatuation with Newton as the worst kind of radical chic.’ On this very relationship, Biskind cites screenwriter, actor and director Buck Henry – the inside outsider of this entourage – as saying he ‘always thought left-wing politics in and out Hollywood was about pussy and/or drugs ... Huey served the sense of these guys’ embarrassment about where they came from and what kind of privilege they received, and in turn he got a lot of cute white girls laid at his feet. He also laid down a dose of clap and syphilis that went through an awful lot of people.’18 Henry’s own judgement and moralism aside, his observation of the bad faith of identificatory politics is both incisive and perspicacious. As if in order to be or to have the dispersed, the deracinated and the oppressed, these students of the margins, of other and minority cultures construct an experience of the margin or the outland had entirely from the centre, the homeland. The paradox is an obvious one, especially for the intellectuals in question – they are out of excuses. The excursions of the cartographer, the colonial explorations of the anthropologist, the ethnographer or the ethnographic filmmaker are all grist to the mill of the postcolonial student or theorist and, even though experiences at the periphery might well be jotted in a diary and recorded for posterity, these experiences are still largely centrist constructs. The search for and inscription of one culture in another, in the name of discovery, study, science or exposition is itself being charted by this new breed of postcolonialist, apparently un-‘bracketed’ by the cultural and imperial difference of those who ventured before them. What, precisely, are they

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Introduction

looking for? One thing is certain: in their clamorous theoretical appeal to the construction of an anti-identitarian subject the exact opposite is propounded – a non-reflexive cultural identity and ethnic authenticity. The anti-identitarian in fact courts a politics of identification, a mimetic perversion without compare – the identitarian subject is their raison d’être, their body of Christ, and they its supplicants. In a desperate attempt to hold onto this fantasy, of the subjective homeland – this very hearth that nurtures and at the same time allows for the possibility of a subjective outland – the liberal intellectual finds solace in the Third World otherness of the subalterns, and it is in their interest to keep them there. Billy Wilder’s 1951 film The Big Carnival (aka Ace in the Hole) tells the story of Chuck Tatum, a New York journalist on the rails in Albuquerque. On his way to cover a rattlesnake hunt after a year in this New Mexico backwater, Tatum (Kirk Douglas) comes upon Leo Minosa, a service station cum souvenir shop proprietor trapped in an old Indian cave. While Leo could perhaps be extricated without much danger, Tatum – the only one of the gathering willing to enter the cave – decides to keep him there in order to get a story and boost his career. A true subaltern with identity ‘hyphenated’ across several boundaries – Hispanic–American, working-class, ex-serviceman – Leo is Tatum’s ace in the hole. People come from miles around for this human interest story – Tatum is in control and in constant touch with Leo and also his wife. Just as he has promised Leo out of his predicament, he offers the same deal to her – and with that come certain privileges. He gets ‘close’ to his subaltern but it’s too late – Leo dies before they can save him. But, while this example serves to illustrate the position of the marginalist intellectual – the epistemic and ontological violence is already well-articulated by the deracinated Wilder – it also serves their power position in that their identification necessarily lies with the figure of the subaltern, not the star who truly, and perversely, represents them. This is the victimology that is the narrative stuff of the new marginalist – postcolonialism as a form of neocolonialism. I write here about marginality, but a marginality of a particular nature. I take the term marginalism discursively and textually, in the manner of those who have made it their business to look to the reading and writing of various frontiers and the folk who dwell there. This will of necessity take in the musings of theory on exile and the marginal or what we might call the exilic – those of various borders, of nations and states (real or imagined). But, while these enterprises look to what might be termed the dialogical and contingently dialectical aspects of the marginal predicament, they are lost to the reflexive, phenomenological aspects that

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set it up as a space for subjective inquiry in the first instance. Rather than marginality, it would be more proper to speak of marginalism, giving it the sense of the venture and enterprise it has become (in the manner Said intended in his definition of ‘Orientalism’, more of which later). My attention is therefore turned to those who are, in fact, far from the periphery and who write and read on the subject, largely, from home – that is, the academics and their political (and usually institutional) brethren, the public intellectuals. The relative ‘positionality’ adopted variously by students and numerous other disenfranchised groupings – even some workers – aligned to and mobilized by a range of anti-globalization, environmentalist or other fundamentalist causes marching under the banner of the marginal is altogether another issue. This too goes for what passes as political action undertaken by these groupings – in the spectrum of violence this is, by and large, the playground violence aimed at achieving a certain street credibility for the cause that can be dispensed with upon graduation or entry to the establishment proper. While positions here are indeed taken and poses adopted much in the vein of their ‘sixties’ poster boys and girls – that is, barricades stormed, police attacked, blood smeared if not entirely spilled – this is not the marginalism I have in mind. It is to the properly institutionalized and ‘transmitted’ variety that I wish to attend. Writing in the 1970s, philosopher–Jesuit Michel de Certeau was looking closely at the margins of society – especially what he termed the ‘new marginalisms’ – the sites and means by which certain subcultures were defined and defining themselves. While indeed taking in the now well-established marginal phenomena of ethnicity, gender and social class, he began to look at certain marginal crossings – which of necessity imply an intersection of the social centre – and the manner in which communication, movement and quotidian activity played their part in situating the margins and their subjects. In this, his work comes close to the historiographical work of Foucault, the Subaltern Studies group and Spivak in particular. He observed at a micro-level a diversity of forms of alterity constituted of interstitial lines of communication uttered between a more diverse cast than the theatrical productions imagined by his many contemporaries. His collection of writings from 1974 shows the extent of both his critical eclecticism and his putative engagement. It is here too he was adverting to the notion of new marginalisms, the very culture of the plural and alterity he would call heterologies, which looks to the sites from which cultural liberation might take place.19

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Here too I propose a reading of a new marginalism, but a phenomenon that bears but a passing resemblance to the theoretical disposition of de Certeau and his contemporaries in theoretical heterogeneity. What I propose and wish to elaborate is something of a pathological marginalism, bound in representations of the marginal experience and the extent to which the theoretician is intricated in the marginal’s evolution into another ideological genus, and one at that which is increasingly difficult to locate. Where de Certeau sought to describe the experience of the marginal – in whatever laudatory and often ludicrous terms – I argue that such experience (at least as can be articulated) is rarely had from the perspective of those who seek to describe, explore or analyse the phenomenon. Its continued articulation serves such theoreticians of the heterodox as they themselves adopt the position they originally described. The new marginalism has been usurped by the theoretician, whose various theories are now mobilized only to further forge an identification with their nominated other, an alterity that, in this milieu, gives them an unassailable cultural and political cachet. While we look at marginality from this perspective, numerous cultural, historical and geopolitical exigencies of state – the interstices of history, of experience – will, however, offer themselves up to this predicament and here I will, as Walker Percy might have had it, ‘poke about’. Rarely will I enter the realm of the dispossessed, the downcast, the exiled or the subaltern proper; and, while historical and other specificities and their various intellectual and political agents and agencies will come into view, the issue of exile and its subjects is not my turf. This is for good reason. Studies in the field are vast and well-established, and already deal in the concrete experience of their subjects, the banished and the seekers of asylum. Disciplines of research across the Humanities such as Exile and Diaspora, Development and Third World Studies, to name but four extensive and rigorous fields of this academic endeavour, deal comprehensively with the plight and fate of displaced populations and real marginal experience. Scanning the history and meaning of the exiled and the marginalized in a very broad sense, from the charting of the dispersed and their narratives throughout history to the intricacies of gaining refugee status in various countries throughout the world, these academic disciplines – notwithstanding the political lobbying of their various interested parties – offer constant critical surveillance of the outcast and their predicaments worldwide. The margins I have in mind are those of the theoretical narrative of critics and their subjects (more properly objects), both written and

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writing, but here my intention is to render the marginal condition as a particular fantastic construction across a range of critical and theoretical disciplines – the liminal theoretical space not of les banlieues of Paris and their diverse inhabitants, but of the new marginalists – the ones who seek their (existential) space. This construction is forged by means of various subtheses, certain subcategorical discourses advanced under the aegis of postcolonial, poststructuralist and postmodern theorizing, their attention paid to the relation of subjects to place and/or practice. Much has been made of diaspora. It is now an overarching and overdetermined trope that has more to do with a kind of marginal or exilic symptom or even charm than the reality of the experience. James Clifford adroitly points to an ‘unruly crowd of descriptive/interpretive terms [that] now jostle and converse in an effort to characterize the contact zones of nations, cultures, and regions: terms such as border, travel, creolization, transculturation, hybridity, and diaspora (as well as the looser diasporic)’.20 He wonders how, in this strange liminal space, such discourses might make claim to actually ‘represent experiences of displacement, of constructing homes away from home?’ and at the same time precisely what experiences would they ‘reject, replace, or marginalize?’ Clifford rightly observes a certain ‘slippage’ between discourses and theories on diaspora and the experiences they seek out. ‘These are not, of course, equivalent. But in practice,’ he rightly observes, ‘it has not always been possible to keep them clearly separate, especially since I am discussing a kind of “theorizing” that is always embedded in particular maps and histories.’21 Negotiating these very maps and histories, Gregory Jusdanis points out that ‘often critics use “diaspora” when they actually mean ethnic group’22 and while this is an unnecessarily problematic conflation it is one that serves marginalists well – it inflates their project, availing it ever greater scope and further potential identification with their questionable cause. This is further exacerbated when the diasporic and the exilic are conflated with the merely marginal. Edward Said (doubtless one of the starting blocks for much of the theory this minoritarian Academe presently sponsors) rightly differentiates between exiles, expatriates, refugees and émigrés, arguing that ‘the word refugee has become a political one, suggesting large herds of innocent and bewildered people requiring urgent international assistance.’23 But he confirms the poetic and fantastic urge of the marginalist when he adds, unhelpfully, that the word ‘ “exile” carries with it ... a touch of solitude and spirituality’.24 He affirms this by borrowing from Eric Auerbach’s famous exilic tract Mimesis the musings of Hugo of St Victor, a medieval monk from Saxony,

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Introduction

who wrote these ‘hauntingly beautiful lines’: ‘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.’25 That is not the end of Hugo – something of the self-flagellant, or the self-congratulatory outlander, can still be read and seen in the musings and all too numerous representations of the new marginalist. To this end, the marginalism I wish to chart might find itself in uncomfortable places that, while they have little to do with the national or political strife experienced in a real diaspora, implicate it in the symbolic realm of the diasporic and the exilic – maps and histories. It is precisely this fantasy, a particular and ever-tightening conflation between the perverse projections of the marginalist and the subjects of the margins, I want to explore – the critic needs a subject, an object of study, and this may be found in the subterfuge of the self. This attention to the self is critical here. The theoretical enterprises of poststructuralist and postcolonial theorizing have colluded in the surveillance of the play and/or forces of power, desire and knowledge in both former colonies and, somewhat curiously, of various persons and minority communities within certain quarters of the First World. Indeed, individuals and minorities have been held theoretically hostage – interpellated veritable subalterns by theoreticians in some perverse bid to restore their history and customs, to rescue and even extricate them from the oppressive, now globalized, market forces of the very nation states in which they seek succour – namely the West. There is, of course, nothing new in all this. The stuff of the subject – the theorization of the self and subjectivity in question – has been fodder for academia since the Enlightenment. But what is new is the fact that the lived experience of this subaltern subject has, since about the 1960s, become the booty of theoreticians keen to claim the minoritarian space for themselves. In a less than flattering appraisal of such a disposition comes this black comic screed and adroit observation by right-wing pundit and provocateur P.J. O’Rourke: ‘The search for victims of injustice to pester explains why liberals won’t leave minorities alone ... And, when it comes to minorities there is none greater – or is it lesser – than that ultimate of minorities, the self. Here the liberal truly comes into his own.’26 Cultural theory, and its broader reach in cultural studies, has taken to the study of the margins and minority experience with alacrity – the pervasive attendance of the postmodern and the heterogeneous, which is by now axiomatic in more liberal quarters of the Humanities, has ensured its proponents have taken a seat in this little theatre of human

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inquiry some have called Grand Theory.27 And so it is not at all coincidental that it too, has taken to the study of the postcolonial with a lickerish intent. Here the concentration tends more to literary or narrative representations of the subject of the postcolonial margin, focusing largely on literary works in which marginal concerns or themes are rendered in narratives and read through narrative interpretation, facilitating and perpetuating the familiar narratological conflation between the subject of the enunciation (the subject writing) and the subject of the ‘enounced’ (the subject written). It is no coincidence that the subjects of such critics as Edward Said and Homi Bhabha are such figures as Conrad and James and their depicted states, of mind, of predicament, and they do not pretend otherwise. André Breton put it that the ‘whole history of fiction since Arnim is that of liberties taken with the idea of “I am” ’28 and, again, it is no coincidence that this criticism is avowedly in pursuit of what may be termed a certain kernel of adventure, of transgression and, indeed, rupture. Be they the first narratives of the banished and dispersed, the adventures in uncharted terrain of errant philosophers, deities, and explorers, of the charted excursions of colonizers and their following populations, the misadventures of those who attempted to thwart or resist them, or the literary or discursive attempt to chart that experience in the minds of its subjects, these experiences are displayed and dissected by readers and critics alike. Maurice Blanchot spoke to this marginal predicament when he asked: ‘what does it mean to “be alone”? When is one alone?’ Blanchot here is speaking of the artist, the writer who relegates himself to the solitude of the simple reflexive space of writing – he speaks of Kafka’s delightful observation that the moment he came to ‘substitute “he” for “I” he entered literature’. Now Blanchot prefaces this observation with the existentialist caveat that ‘[s]olitude on the level of the world is a wound we do not need to comment on here.’29 Here Blanchot is bracketing the physicality of dislocation and displacement as it has been expressed in the annals of history and the experience of the outcast, and in this my argument comes close to his. But this conflation of the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the ‘enounced’ is precisely at the core of the relation between self and world, between homeland and outland, which cannot be occluded from the realm of experience in the world. The ‘inner world’ of which he speaks is the reflective space of abstracted territories of the subjective, refracted perspectives on a self that is at once grounded and lost to that ground, in that reflection is the source of desire, displacement and disavowal. This ground, the territory, is by

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Introduction

no means neutral – we shall find here the peculiar ways of the new marginalist ... Said speaks of colonialism’s vacillation between the foreign and the familiar – of a simultaneously contradictory and conflationary (intimate) move between extremes of the known and the unknown. He argues that since extremes are difficult to negotiate there is a tendency for foreignness and distance to close on the familiar, emerging as a new median category, a rational middle term that allows one to see new things, things in fact seen for the first time, as something previously known – something akin to the Romantic notion of rendering the strange familiar and the familiar strange. (Said, it seems, kept his Wordsworth and Coleridge handy.) This is a means of controlling a potential threat to the established view and order of things.30 For marginalist intellectuals the problem is compounded – they want, they need, to be accommodated in the bosom of their own reflective presence. They must eschew the aggressive path to attaining the subject – or more properly the object – of their discourse (their desire), but must, at all costs, attain its position – identify with it and incorporate it. From the outset – from the essentially post-Enlightenment cognitive adventure through various discourses on modern consciousness (as the representative condition of the displaced, alienated or deracinated, etc.) to the putatively postmodern – this affectivity has imbued the marginalist disposition, a phenomenon created and largely fostered by a generation of theorists and students of the subject as they chart its course and set sail for the inscrutable land it may come to occupy. Jusdanis reads the marginal symptom with acuity when he writes ‘the deification of hybridity has much to say about the self-imagining of global intellectuals. For they are most conscious of themselves as diasporic and represent their specific identity as a human condition.’31 Percy had it that ‘there is no such thing, strictly speaking as a literature of alienation. In the representing of alienation,’ he continues, the category is reversed and becomes something entirely different. There is a great deal of difference between an alienated commuter riding a train and this same commuter reading a book about an alienated commuter on a train. The non-reading commuter exists in true alienation, which is unspeakable; the reading commuter rejoices in the speakability of his alienation and in the new triple alliance of himself, the alienated character, and the author. His mood is affirmatory and glad: Yes! that is how it is – which is an aesthetic reversal of alienation ... To picture a truly alienated man, picture a Kafka to whom it had never occurred to write a word.32

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In her famous tract on the liminal, both carnal (Bataille) and philosophical (Hegel), Julia Kristeva argued that we have here a fantasy of incorporation: the ‘means by which I attempt to escape fear’.33 Such a fantasy is played out in this new criticism – in the new marginalism – the various literatures of alienation caught in the lures of minority discourses and the subjects of exile. ‘Affectability! A vanity spawned by fear’ is the diagnosis delivered by a truly alienated figure (an English doctor, drunk with beer and classical education) on the pathology of a borderline alien (a quasi-intellectual school teacher), both marginalized in the hot sun of the Australian outback in Canadian Ted Kotcheff’s film of Australian Kenneth Cook’s novel Wake in Fright (1970). These fictions of alienation are now constructed in a fashion more literal than their predecessors, the stuff of their narrative forged more forcefully in the wars, conflagrations and diasporas of recent history. As to the notion of the West, my aim is not to survey its literary canon and its exilic or marginalist tendencies or those of its critics but to point to a certain disparity between the West as a metaphysical and narrative construct – viz. the apparent and paradoxically ‘Occidental’ Centre to which diasporic, minority or marginal discourses must refer and react – and that of its projected other, the Third World or the nether regions of a discourse of otherness. As the new canon of postcolonial literature and criticism would have it, there is some apparent but mercurial antidote to this putatively Western centrism. This notion is itself something in need of further charting, but that must happen elsewhere. I shall take the notion of the West here for what it is – the world emergent from Enlightenment thought that may be more than a little beholden to the Greeks ... So what kind of telling, what kind of reading of these tales do I have in mind? Writing on Marx’s Capital, Louis Althusser posed the apparently simple question: ‘what is it to read?’ A philosophical reading, he argued, ‘is quite the opposite of an innocent reading. It is a guilty reading, but one that absolves its crime on confessing it.’34 While I seek no exculpation here, I think it important to speak of which reading I might be guilty and to that end will show my hand. I have supped at the low table of cultural studies and am largely a product of it. Initially a student of art, I became increasingly attracted to the observations of its criticism, which was also, at that time, impacting practice. More traditional practices such as drawing, painting and sculpture were (to the chagrin of the traditionalists) being subsumed by film, photography and, perhaps worse, new and mixed media – what British art critic Peter Fuller (at the height of a visit of his to my country and polytechnic) would ruefully call the anaesthesia of the mega-visual tradition, the highly

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reproducible stuff of advertising, television and printing he believed attested not only to the rude health of international capital but to the crudescence of the aesthetic form.35 He was, indeed, on to something. By the late 1970s cultural theory had insinuated its way into the Academy such that theory was now married to practice in such a manner that some funny-looking progeny were now walking its corridors or hanging on its gallery walls. Translations of French and German theories of culture were coming thick and fast to my own polytechnic via ‘critical faculties’ that were already ascendant in the United Kingdom and the United States. As Eagleton rightly observed: ‘The cultural revolution migrated from the so-called Third World to the wellheeled West in a heady mélange of Fanon, Marcuse, Reich, Beauvoir, Gramsci and Godard.’36 By the dawn of the 1980s art had, by now, taken a predictably reproducible and disposable turn and cultural studies had become firmly institutionalized. It was also entrenched in High Street couture – cultural studies was itself commodified in precisely the way it predicted other artefacts would be. More than that, it became an orthodoxy, and a strange one at that – an orthodoxy of the unorthodox or, as its pundits would likely aver, the heterodox. It established a mainstream minoritarianism that proved every bit as hegemonic as the establishment itself. Frankly, I come close to Joe Queenan’s schoolboy thesis when he admits I’m getting a bit fed up with the vanquished chic thing. I want to withdraw from the frontiers, these margins that are the loci of fascination for much, particularly recent, cultural study and avowed criticism, and in so doing use some of the critical tools that have facilitated its very creation to explore the motives and theoretical manoeuvres of its perpetrators. To this extent I position myself as an insider and, at least, an erstwhile collaborator. In what follows I mark out some intuitive and reflexive spaces of criticism and its various narrative, ideological, political, cultural and representative forms as spaces of marginalization and a certain exile. I approach these spaces from the very privileged position of the homeland in an attempted reappraisal of the essential and defining narrative of that homeland, from within. To this end I cast an eye on the culture derived from this narrative and explore at length some of the theoretical, philosophical and political intricacies of the relation between subject formation and its representative culture with the constant reminder that this culture and this culture of criticism, as Adorno reminds us, ‘is not to be reconciled with the conception [it] has of itself. It abhors stench because it stinks – because, as Brecht put it in a magnificent line, its mansion is built of dogshit. Years after that line

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was written,’ he continued, ‘Auschwitz demonstrated irrefutably that culture has failed.’37 Writing on Nietzsche, Deleuze (younger than the one parried with by Spivak) argued that ‘[w]e will never find the sense of something (of a human, a biological or even a physical phenomenon) if we do not know the force which appropriates the thing, which exploits it, which takes possession of it or is expressed in it. A phenomenon,’ he continues, ‘is not an appearance or even an apparition but a sign, a symptom which finds its meaning in an existing force. The whole of philosophy is a symptomatology and a semeiology.’38 The existing force of marginality may well be found in the symptomatology of the subjective sign – that is, representation and its correlative, the subject (the subject here must not be forgotten, lost to the very signification and imagery that entrance it). And further, on Marx’s critical relation to Feuerbach, Althusser wrote that ‘borrowing a systematically interrelated set of concepts, borrowing a real problematic, cannot be accidental, it binds the borrower.’39 This is as true for the writer of the margin as the writer on the margin, both bound in a critical problematic that is beholden to its very structural origins. Derrida too, sensibly, would write that ‘we cannot do without the concept of the sign, for we cannot give up this metaphysical complicity without also giving up the critique we are directing against this complicity ... every particular borrowing brings along with it the whole of metaphysics.’40 This indeed is the point and, I submit, I am suitably bound. To this end I endeavour to engage with both theory and cultural artefacts, the latter being largely those representative and ‘semiological’ enterprises – literature, poetry, music and film – that have come to illustrate most forcefully any given cultural disposition. I have taken the scopic regime (Metz) and epistemological power of the cinema as a means to both elucidate and frame my arguments. In this I reflect not only my own aesthetic prejudices but the sensually ‘full’ (visile/audile) nature of the film form and its particular performative and mimetic attributes as reflective of the identitarian tendency under investigation. It is not for nothing that this cultural form is routinely mobilized by cultural critics and, perhaps not coincidentally, those in my sights. It would not be at all uncommon for a present-day Arts undergraduate in Western sandstones and polytechnics alike to be offered some art history, and a little cinema with their comparative literature. To paraphrase documentarist Errol Morris’s take on an old adage, one can pursue truth with a pen or with a camera. Chapter 1 takes a look at the beginnings of this new marginalism in an effort to contextualize theoretically and politically this curious

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Introduction

disposition and its particular affectability. It takes them to a phenomenologically and psychoanalytically rendered space where they are, variously, at home (zu haus) – precisely the (heimisch) metaphor by which much of their rhetoric and, I argue, pathology might be traced. Here we find something of the aetiology of the marginalist malady. Chapter 2 leaves the house for the country, the homeland (Heimat) that binds most of us in one way or another. As I discuss what I see to be the ground of this new fascination with the margins – and by this I mean its new manifestations in and through theory – I explore here the relation between a number of theorists (and champions) of the marginal or exilic condition and the various political, theoretical and textual problematics from which they operate. Here too is the geopolitical projection, the inherent and perverse but disavowed nationalism and chauvinism at the heart of the very same critics who have a lot to say on the issue. In this I include a variety of critical narratives – simultaneously shot through and obfuscated in the liminal that defines its places and persons of interest – that I believe expose the bad faith (in both its quotidian and Sartrean sense) of this new marginalism. In Chapter 3 I look to various readings, reflections and positions on and of the marginalist, with particular emphasis on the motif of a kind of subjective erasure – the conundrum of the anti-identitarian and counterhegemonic enterprise that is the stuff of the new marginalist and which is always in danger of losing the very subject on which it dwells. Here, the subject becomes the negative term – the ‘vanishing point’ – implicit in all discourse and representation (particularly that of poststructuralist and postmodern theorizing) at the core of the narrative of the margins. Here I argue that the authors of these heimisch narratives fall into a reflective trap of identification with the subjects of their avowedly critical discourse and the space they rightly call their own and, thereby, negate them. Chapter 4 explores the ‘conflationary logic of marginalism’ – the subjective symptomatology that is the metaphysical, representative and truly political stuff of the marginal. Here I pursue the abstractions in representation that, I argue, are the affect of the hidden conflations and contradictions that form a certain metaphysical kernel of both the subject and the representation itself. We find here the subject at the penumbra of ideology, textuality, sociology, historiography, colonialism and the politics of racism and identity, and the borders and margins that define them. Chapter 5 concludes by looking at the marginalist subject from the perspective of what Kristeva has called (after Husserl) the realm of

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positions and what Hegel called the native land of truth, the kingdom where the subject comes to rest in his own home. This requires a particular negotiation of and renunciation of the politics of identity, a politics I argue has been fostered by the cant of the marginalist and, paradoxically, the championed anti-identitarian cause. I approach a number of readings of Islamism as a properly reflective positioning of Said with reference to the ‘civilizational’ conflagrations post-September 11 and some earlier seeds to the reflexive Orientalism of the marginalists themselves: a return to metaphysics in an attempt to repatriate, to their true political home, the subject of the margins. While denying home, by playing at the margins, by refusing the call of its true metaphysical being the subject, eventually, comes full circle.

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Introduction xxix

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1 Theorists under the Big Top, Disorientated

While writing of the marginalist enterprise from another angle, Craig Ireland has adroitly traced something of its origins to the political and discursive fracas between the British and French Marxisms of the early 1960s. After various political skirmishes, cultural theory emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a kind of feral subaltern inquiry that sought to gain ascendancy in the name of a certain politics of identity, an ‘immediate experience’ that ‘can as readily foster progressive subaltern politicking as they can exacerbate regressive, convulsive tribalism’.1 The British culturalist Marxist E.P. Thompson had savaged the French structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser, arguing that a true counterhegemonic political agenda required agency and the specific cultural experiences of its agents to conduct it; the Althusserian structuralist move, he argued, was simply too deterministic to allow for the necessary play of such agency. For Thompson and others in his camp (Williams, Hoggart, Willis) it was through the sharing of lived experience that the subaltern (well, the working classes) could achieve a class- and self-consciousness that should, it was argued, give rise to political action. The culturalists argued that Marxism had become too easily identified with a determinism that constrained the role of human agency and experience in history, rendering the human role passive; and, moreover, an economism in Marxist theory had restricted the apprehension of human relations to those merely of labour. Culturalists were unashamedly humanist in their leanings and argued instead that Marxist theory should look to the human freedoms as displayed in their intellectual, cultural and political relations as a place from which action could be stirred. It was 1

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First Person Reflection: Origins of the Marginal Disposition

Writing Diaspora in the West

from here, they argued, that the subaltern could chance their arm against the hegemon. Thompson had argued that his theoretical work had already explored in terms of both theory and practice the critical concepts of the social apparatus ‘by which through the missing term “experience,” structure is transmuted into process, and the subject re-enters history’.2 Where Thompson sought a foothold for the subject to ‘get back into history’ – from which he’d argued Althusser had extracted or, at least, occluded him – he now found a body politic in each corner of the ring so tenacious his fight plan was proving difficult, to say the least. As Ireland paints Thompson’s dilemma, by the early 1960s ‘Althusser’s version of structuralism had turned ideology into so tentacular an entity that the very possibility of agency became wishful thinking at best. It was no longer sufficient to clamour for counterhistories and local cultures’ which ‘had yet to be written, and subaltern cultures, when present were in need of invigoration’.3 If not a technical knockout, the structuralist enterprise was already winning on points. Culturalism was suffering the insults of structuralist sorties both from abroad and from within, as their own were beginning to take heed. While the German neo-Marxism of the Frankfurt School and some influence from the Italian Marxist Gramsci had already mounted a formidable counterhegemonic front well before the structuralist enterprise raised its head, their work trailed the French in sheer popularity. And, while certain major works and theoreticians – Horkheimer and Adorno, Marcuse, and especially Benjamin – made inroads into cultural theory (even influencing the French), their solidity and seriousness seemed less of an insult to the British Marxists. By the late 1960s it was evident that structuralism in various guises was indeed taking hold in the Anglo-American studies of culture. Structuralism of various incantations from the sociopolitical to the semiotic and the psychoanalytic – was enthusiastically translated by the British (Brewster, Heath, McCabe, New Left Review and New Left Books, Radical Philosophy, Screen) and by the early 1970s was just as enthusiastically shoe-horned into university courses that could conceivably accommodate a cultural studies bent (English and French studies, sociology, philosophy, comparative literature) where it was not yet formally and discretely offered as in the vanguard of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. As Stuart Hall, at the end of his tenure as Director at this very institution, described this new eclectic cultural theory of the time, ‘it conceptualizes culture as interwoven with all social practices; and those practices, in turn, as a common form

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of human activity; sensuous human praxis, the activity through which men and women make history.’4 The French were coming to cultural theory in Western intellectual circles faster than they could be translated. Neither French studies nor the French language were any longer prerequisites for access to a vast array of theoreticians as they were disseminated in quickly pressed anthologies or rogue translations for campus and sometimes more popular distribution. While the grandfathers of structuralism, the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, were either dead or retired by the time Althusser came on the scene, arguably the most influential French structuralist, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, was at his feisty peak and still teaching through the seventies. His own flair and place in the pantheon, not only of psychoanalysis but of the French intellectual scene of the sixties, had enamoured him to a whole new generation of performative radicals, his legacy still resonant today. Alexandre Kojève and his legendary lectures on Hegel’s Phenomeonology cannot here be ignored – their impact on the intellectualism afoot during the 1960s cannot be avoided. Held in Paris during the 1930s, Kojève’s seminars saw not only the presentation of a radically original reinterpretation of Hegel (influenced by the unlikely coalition of Heidegger and Marx) but the gathering of some of the country’s most formidable intellectuals, including the likes of Breton, Bataille, Lacan, Aron, Merleau-Ponty, Weil, Klossowski, Queneau and Blanchot. The subsequent influence was such that Kojève’s thinking was never far from some of the most important philosophical minds and questions to have come out of France at the end of the last century, including the structuralist move itself. And, while many of these very people would come to deny the influence both of Hegel and of Kojève on their own theoretical projects, it was precisely the latter’s incisive, radical and interstitial approach to the grand narrative that it is traceable in nearly all of them – structuralist and poststructuralist alike. While he continued to write philosophy and numerous critical reviews after the war, he was to become a mandarin of the French bureaucracy and, notably, architect of the EEC and the centrality of France on the European stage. He expressed little interest in the student activities leading up to May 1968 – on a visit to Berlin the previous year he was approached by student radicals seeking tactical advice, to which he laconically replied, ‘Learn Greek!’ – and he died shortly after they took to the streets. Despite his lack of interest in the student cause, he was considered suitably chic to become a best seller after publication of a collection of his lectures by one of his famous students Raymond

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First Person Reflection 3

Writing Diaspora in the West

Queneau in English translation in 1969.5 As one fervent critic writing in 1961 put it, ‘the transmission was effected by means of oral initiation to a group of persons who in turn took the responsibility of instructing others and so on ... From that time on we have breathed Kojève’s teaching with the air of the times.’6 As Althusser’s star was beginning to fade and the old reliable philosophical éminence grise Sartre now reduced to banal commentaries on any given Left or quasi-left cause, their compatriots were, so to speak, on the march and their insinuation was more than that of mere structuralism. What the culturalists weren’t counting on was the establishment of structuralist inroads into that sensuous human praxis in their own back yard. At the same time this deterministic structure was said to leave no room for the subject to move, to experience, act or practice – it was taking in all comers and, for the culturalists, becoming at once a bastion of many bad French theoretical habits and a hostel for wards of numerous (parlous) theoretical states. Interestingly, the movement was proving a typically popular French export, but the reception cannot be said to have been the same at the domestic level. Althusser was less than interested in the British culturalist antagonism towards him; he was busily ducking critical blows from his own compatriots (Glucksmann, Castoriadis, even Rancière), and, especially after theory (and structuralism in particular) had a lacklustre outing during the events of May 1968, he and his Leftist fellows down at the École normale supérieure (despite Althusser’s own refusal of the structuralist epithet) were copping a pasting by virtually every student radical groupuscule on the block: ‘Althusser à rien!’ was just one student scrawl on the walls of the Academy.7 Regardless of their adoption of some form of Marxism, the structuralists were party to the so-called linguistic turn which took to linguistics, semiology and psychoanalysis (Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Greimas, Todorov, Lacan) – a move Lyotard wryly called ‘a tendency to stuff all of semiotics into linguistics’8 – and ideology (Althusser, Poulantzas, Gramsci) and came to their admixture in textuality as the touchstone of any cultural concern. This tendency seemed to mix well with the academic voices that were now forming something of a constitutive if ill-tuned chorus of subalternity from a diversity of geopolitical and ideological quarters worldwide. The political action sought by Thompson was now just as likely to emerge from Saint-Denis or Detroit as it was from Offenbach or Wolverhampton. And, it has to be said, the din of counterhistories was now being heard from both sides of the Channel (and the Atlantic) as Western Marxism (by and large with a ‘mouth-feel’ of Althusserianism) began to emerge from a

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much more eclectic base than even some of its more humanist or culturalist proponents may have considered. Vincent Leitch suitably called this new eclecticism embraced by the cultural studies of Birmingham a ‘protocol of entanglement’, by which he means that strands of culturalism and structuralism were brought together ‘using Gramscian theory as a bridge’ and in the doing adopted a mélange of cultural criticism to unpick cultural objects and phenomena of the everyday. ‘Programmatically, the arts of the street and the marketplace displace those of the traditional museum and library. Among the predominant modes of inquiry are ethnographic descriptions, “textual” explications, field interviews, group surveys, and ideological and institutional analyses.’9 It is in this avowedly egalitarian spirit that Richard Johnson, Hall’s successor at Birmingham, posed the critical question: ‘Should cultural studies aspire to be an academic discipline?’ The extent to which the Academy might enter or codify the strange new argot of the free spirits of cultural studies was of great concern to the new critical enterprise: ‘A codification of methods or knowledges (instituting them, for example, in formal curricula or in courses on “methodology”),’ argued Johnson, ‘runs against some main features of cultural studies as a tradition: its openness and theoretical versatility, its reflexive even self-conscious mood, and, especially, the importance of critique.’10 Just as, in this new curriculum, they might come to study Groucho as well as Karl Marx, it seems they were taking the former’s famous joke to heart: ‘I wouldn’t join any club that would have someone like me for a member!’ But some were pushing for critical and cultural activity beyond this apparent theoretical divide, and by the mid-1980s French critical eclecticism was rampant in the human sciences of the Western Academy, emanating even from quarters non-French (if, indeed, Francophone). Writing from his post at the University of California at San Diego, French émigré Michel de Certeau had been contemplating ‘histories from below’ and various other culturally marginal activities and the uses to which they might be put in the realm of modern capital. The mobilization of a veritable army of immigrants, homeless and anyone who wanted to put up their hands to take something back from the ever-extorting nature of commodity capital was one suggestion. It is true de Certeau had been propounding the virtues of pluralism and the culturally heterodox since the early 1970s – his interest in what might be called the power of the voice during and since the events of 1968, in culturally liminal spaces (the new marginalisms), and in opportunities for cultural renewal and a certain border writing (communication) were by now well established and his work both well regarded and coming to the fore.11

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First Person Reflection 5

Writing Diaspora in the West

But by the early 1980s one could be forgiven for suspecting he was of the mind that the avatars of cultural studies had joined with some community arts collective to hold hands with migrants and the homeless and that all manner of cultural activity would make the story of the common man heard above the greedy din of Wall Street. Between tracts of theoretical potency and great lucidity appeared daft observations and musings approaching scenes from Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life with Ma Bailey inviting us in for cookies and milk. The metanarratives were being broken down and transmogrified into little morsels of theoretical ‘take-out’. He was indeed, declarative: ‘Marginality is today no longer limited to minority groups, but is rather massive and pervasive; this cultural activity of the non-producers of culture, an activity that is assigned, unreadable, and unsymbolized,’ de Certeau argued, ‘remains the only one possible for all those who nonetheless buy and pay for the showy products through which a productivist economy articulates itself. Marginality is becoming universal. A marginal group has now become a silent majority.’ And, it seems, everyone was out for a walk and a chat, exercising their right to ‘pedestrian enunciation’, creating ‘a mobile organicity in the environment, a sequence of phatic topoi’ as they waved to Deleuze and Guattari’s schizophrenic, who was already out for a walk, on their way across their suburban margins.12 So here’s a programme, and just one among many that will enter the avowedly strategic ideological realm of culture and its study during this strange milieu. As it turns out, Johnson’s concerns were portentous: ‘Most decisively, perhaps, we need ways of viewing a vigorous but fragmented field of study, if not as a unity at least as a whole. If we do not discuss central directions of our own, we will be pulled hither and thither by the demands of academic self-reproduction and by the academic disciplines from which our subject, in part, grows.’13 As he spoke these words in 1983, the cat of academic self-reproduction was already out of the bag and, while there might not have been much discipline attached to this fragmented field of study, it was indeed codified and had forged something of its own tradition within the Academy. As codified and as ubiquitous as it became, its Marxist progenitor was progressively and surely effaced as some irrelevant political remainder. The fact was that theory proved difficult – difficult to translate, difficult to read and even more difficult to get right in the minds of the students who were strangely flocking to it. As the arts of the street and the marketplace indeed began to displace those of the traditional museum and library there was less attachment to theory and more to self-expression and an avowed creative approach to the general thrust of the political concerns now being

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discussed in the Academy. And this was precisely conterminous with the thrust of politics and its diminishing theory in the world outside. ‘Cynicism’, to borrow from the mouths of one of John Barth’s mythical literary editors a mock assessment of the times, ‘is general: the student who eschews cheating like the young girl who eschews promiscuity ... is looked upon as a freak ... every generation must write its own “New Syllabus” or reprint the Old one, rebel against its teachers, challenge all the rules ...’14 In the opening narration of Jerzy Skolimowski’s 1966 film The Barrier (Bariera), one of a new breed of young Polish blade seems to both explain and apologize for his generation’s new disposition: ‘Our generation, cynical and devoid of ideals, is still capable of romantic outbursts.’ While coming from a different milieu and cultural context, this could indeed have been the mission statement for cultural studies and its revised new syllabus; the smug but labile disposition would serve this new campus well indeed. Importantly, Eagleton makes a distinction between cultural theory and cultural studies by which he argues the ‘halcyon days of cultural theory lasted until about 1980 – several years after the oil crisis that heralded a global recession, the victory of the radical right and the ebbing of revolutionary hopes ... Theory overshot reality, in a kind of intellectual backwash to a tumultuous political era .... Cultural theory was cut loose from its moment of origin, yet tried in its way to keep that moment warm. Like war,’ he concludes, ‘it became the continuation of politics by another means.’15 Its death knell came with the positioning of poststructuralism and the postmodern as sort of submerged orthodoxies and cultural theory’s supersession by its punk epigone, cultural studies, which, bereft of its forebears’ deep heurism, no longer had any theoretical architecture to prop itself up. Cultural theory turned into the Sunday painter of cultural concern.

A mad aggregate of doctrines, or the revised new syllabus Nearly two decades ago, a perplexed Edward Said found himself on the receiving end of a hostile intervention while delivering a lecture on his proposed sequel to Orientalism at a prestigious US academy. In discussing the Western canon in relation to the culture of imperialism, and Frantz Fanon, he found himself confronted by a phalanx of dissenters, purportedly more marginal than their visiting Professor, accusing him of propagating the very same orientalism he’d spent the best part of his career critiquing. In defence, Said points to a tendency of a certain ‘impoverishing politics of knowledge based only upon the assertion

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First Person Reflection 7

Writing Diaspora in the West

and reassertion of identity, an ultimately uninteresting alternation,’ he argues, ‘of presence and absence.’ While Said recognizes a revolution in thinking in the humanities that he believes to be Copernican in its scope, he laments that ‘the great contest about the canon continues.’ Descending, through this uncritical affirmation of identity, this ‘politics of knowledge,’ he argues, merely ‘asserts a sort of separatism that wishes to draw attention only to itself’. Ultimately neglecting a true consciousness of self in the process of engagement (with self, with world), critics tend to the same unreconstructed nationalism they uniformly decry. Importantly, Said argues that ‘our point … cannot be simply and obdurately to reaffirm the paramount importance of formerly suppressed or silenced forms of knowledge and leave it at that, nor can it be to surround ourselves with the sanctimonious piety of historical or cultural victimhood as a way of making our intellectual presence felt. Such strategies,’ he rightly affirms, ‘are woefully insufficient.’16 What Said goes on to say about the propagation of other centrisms and ethnic particularities put forward to supplant the Otherness of Eurocentrism and its putatively repressive canon cannot be understated. ‘I submit,’ Said declares, ‘that these clamorous dismissals and swooping assertions are in fact caricatural reductions of what the great revisionary gestures of feminism, subaltern or black studies, and anti-imperialist resistance originally intended. For such gestures,’ he concludes, ‘it was never a matter of replacing one set of authorities and dogmas with another, nor of substituting one center for another.’17 Said argued that the ‘intellectual origins of literary theory in Europe were ... insurrectionary’, that the theory of literature picked at the interstices of hegemonic practices in the academy such as humanism and positivism and was a potent reaction to the ‘rigid barriers between academic specialities’ that were the hallmark of intellectual endeavour.18 Extending this thesis, invoking the heroic triumvirate of MarxNietzsche-Freud and the lineage of structuralist thinkers they spawned, Said contends that somehow the spark expired. ‘From the bold insurrectionary movement across lines of specialization,’ he argues, ‘American literary theory of the late seventies had retreated into the labyrinth of textuality,’ avoiding ‘anything that is worldly, circumstantial, or socially contaminated.’19 Textuality has indeed become something of a mantric shield, the socalled linguistic turn an excuse for abstruse theoretical manoeuvring and the evasion of theoretical and philosophical positionality that is essential to the confrontation of other disciplines or orthodoxies and the

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barriers they maintain. Said does go further, arguing that ‘ “[t]extuality” is the somewhat mystical and disinfected subject matter of literary theory’, that it ‘has therefore become the exact antithesis and displacement of what might be called history ... As it is practiced in the American academy today,’ he continues, ‘literary theory has for the most part isolated textuality from the circumstances, the events, the physical circumstances that made it possible and render it intelligible as the result of human work.’20 This critique rings true, especially in the new minority canon of literary and cultural theory and the narratives they harbour. While this has certainly been the effect and largely the agenda of the intellectual industry he describes, America here is certainly not alone – it is the bolthole of the textuality of which he speaks (here the Francophile himself somehow evades the French) but its appropriations are truly global. This is a predicament that must indeed be puzzling to the counterhegemonic subcultures abounding in the hearth of the very hegemon itself. While it may have something to do with Spivak’s observation that the centre welcomes selective inhabitants of the margin in order better to exclude the margin, etc., there is little doubt that the counterhegemonic discourse of the margin is doing rather brisk business today in North America and, for that matter, the rest of the West and the Academy it sponsors. While all free intellectual spirits, it seems, run riot (Nietzsche would have been pleased) in a carnival of antiidentitarian and counterhegemonic delights, the margins are closing in. As conferences, interventions and radical caucuses proliferate in the First World, so too does real subaltern experience in the Third. It is no longer a cottage industry – cheque-book marginalism is rife. To this extent I agree with Said’s definition of the textual, but with a shift in affect. The textual with which I am concerned is contingent on the very workings of the ‘antitheses and displacements’ in and of history. By this I mean a turn to the historical and the metaphysical constructs that govern and determine the structures and narratives of those who live and work within it and those who are oppressed and cast out. These metaphysical constructs are themselves, however, subjective and structural, history being the relation between the two; this is a history contingent on a subjective and structural dialectic, beholden to the agency of its subjects and its own displacement as an agency of homogenization. The text closes in, it is not open. The prophets of heterogeneity and their numerous churches of otherness will have no truck with such a centralizing construct, despite the fact it is indeed their theoretical church rock.

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First Person Reflection 9

Writing Diaspora in the West

Bordwell and Carroll’s book of collected essays on the state of theory appears as some clarion call but with a counterstrategy that gets caught in it own shoe laces. In what appears a promising critique of the dogmatization of (particularly French) theory in the milieu of cultural studies – though their project essentially addresses itself to cinema studies, the former in most international curricula subsumes the latter. After his announcement of ‘the end of Theory, and what can and should come after’21 Bordwell himself goes on to unveil his contempt for this aggregate of doctrines mired in French Theory, and the main culprit in this text is indeed Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and the pantheon of Theory (or, even, theoretical fashion) it has come to influence – the code here is ‘subject-position theory’, the salient doctrine of which Bordwell and Carroll argue is nothing short of ‘high-church Structuralism’.22 It is a salient piece worth some attention, if not simply for its singular failure to actually counter theory, for its effective proof that theory, despite their protestations, in fact might have something to offer. And so it does. While Bordwell and Carroll are onto something, it quickly disappears in a confusion of theoretical directions. Bordwell, in his introductory effort, conflates ‘cultural studies, postmodernism and Frankfurt School culturalism’ in an all too simplistic branding exercise where the term ‘culturalism’ seems to serve his purpose well enough. While having no truck with this form of theorizing either, Bordwell poses this culturalism at least as a ‘bid to rival subject-position theory by offering equally foundational accounts of knowing and acting. The culturalist,’ he argues as if conceding some ground, ‘typically treats social agents as participating in many activities; an agent’s identity is accordingly constituted in and through the overlap of diverse social practices ... they are much freer agents than subject-position theory allows.’23 But this flawed description fails to take account of the fact that this aggregate of culturalist movements has, in some way or another, embraced (at least some) tenets of the very psychoanalytic theory he and coeditor Carroll find so loathsome. As defined and depicted by these authors, culturalism appears as some poststructuralist rainbow coalition forcefully acting out against subject position theory. If indeed their theoretical approach was in response to certain Barthesian and Derridean poststructuralist attacks against the psychoanalyst’s pipe, far from a theoretical rivalry, this movement represents a mere fork in a road, sharing provenance, an avowedly anti-identitarian manifesto and even the same academic spirit of contest. While it may well be true that either a residual or an emphatic historicism inhered in much of the structuralist and poststructuralist enterprise they parade as Grand Theory – and

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doubtless, too, they are right to discern an orthodoxy, a theoretical centrism of sorts – these very arguments around agency, culture, history and, importantly, philosophy, are precisely what theory is about – contested ground. And it needn’t be all that Grand. But the theoretical vagaries of such an eclectic movement are homogenized by both Bordwell and Carroll in a manner that forcefully undermines their project. Where they espouse their own counter theory they immediately denounce this same espousal: ‘There is no Party line here .... If our essays converge on any area, it might be said to occur with respect to “cognitivism”,’ they write. In turning from psychoanalytic doctrines, several of our authors move toward cognitive explanations of filmic reception. But cognitivism in this sense is not a Theory. A casual perusal of work in the field of cognitive science – linguistics, anthropology, psychology, aesthetics, and philosophy of mind – will reveal vivid and irreconcilable differences. We think that cognitivism is best characterized as a stance.24 While in taking a stance these critics should be lauded, it appears they are merely replacing one sort of theorizing with another – not a Theory, they are at pains to point out, but theory nonetheless. Their thesis soon collapses, dispatched along with the baby they throw out with the theoretical bathwater, and just at a point when they begin to make sense of this academic predilection for easy ‘culturalism’ in what amounts to Cultural Studies. ‘Given a strong momentum by feminism, gay/lesbian/ bisexual groups, the unorthodox left, postmodernist aesthetics, and multicultural movements, the culturalist trend,’ Bordwell avers, ‘has become a central force in Anglo-American intellectual circles. Virtually every area of the humanities now nurtures its own culturalist wing.’25 And here he is right on the money. The subcategories or interstices of what once might have been called radicalism have transmogrified – they now stalk the campus as the new marginalism. Ireland incisively terms one angle of this enterprise ‘the subaltern appeal to experience’, an almost programmatic anti-identitarianism in which ‘a proliferation of academic and para-academic “histories from below” and subaltern cultural inquiries that, in spite of their differences, share the notion that the identities and counterhistories of the voiceless and the disenfranchised can be buttressed by the specificity of a group’s concrete experiences’.26 More than the mere girding of the dispossessed, these counterhistories have indeed effected a certain

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First Person Reflection 11

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displacement of their own – that is, the very position and experience of those for whom they wish to speak. Unhelpfully, Bordwell and Carroll exhort their readers to look to what they call middle-level research – research that eschews theorization, hermeneutics and speculation in favour of the solid and empirical endeavour of historians, archivists and ‘mild mannered independent film scholars’ – as an antidote to the plague of Theory.27 Bordwell and Carroll inexplicably include The Frankfurt School neo-Marxists in their list of acceptables. But this group of eclectic but serious theorists – who formed the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) in Frankfurt and with the appointment of Max Horkheimer as Director in 1930 – set the scene for one of the last century’s most formidable bodies of social research. Many of them spent the war in self-imposed exile in the United States, like their voluntarist associate Brecht, before most returned to Germany. They coined the term critical theory (of society) as early as 1937, a theory based on dialectical philosophy, the critique of political economy with a solid dosing of German Idealism (Hegel),28 and during their time (both before World War II and since) have written some of the most important works of cultural criticism (Kulturkritic) and influenced several generations of theory and popular culture itself. The likes of Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm, Kracauer, Benjamin and, in later years, Habermas and Negt represented such a diversity of talent and theoretical discipline as to impact virtually every corner of cultural and critical concern in a manner that survives the Theory described by Bordwell and Carroll. While the work of the Germans has penetrated the recent schools of cultural studies – mostly via the works of Benjamin and Brecht – their lack of affinity with the politics of identity or minoritarianism has seen that they, themselves, have been relatively marginalized. While Bordwell and Carroll do indeed discuss the importance of the uses of theory (their theory), generally they retain the notion of Theory’s profound uselessness, and seem to miss what their erroneously nominated Frankfurt School ‘culturalists’ might have called the theory-praxis nexus. This is most palpable in Bordwell’s assessment of the origins of auteurism and its championing by the canonical critics of Cahiers du cinéma (Bazin, et al.). ‘Like Soviet montage theory before it,’ he argues, ‘it changed the face of film theory, criticism, and historiography.’29 But Bordwell here characteristically dismisses a major film practice in montage (highly schooled in theory) that exerted its influence beyond its borders and political confines and which continues today, in all streams of filmic practice. Soviet filmmaker Roman Karmen, having missed

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the real thing, staged the famous joining of the Soviet armies outside Stalingrad – still shown as documentary footage today, not unlike Eisenstein’s storming of the Winter Palace in October – he didn’t believe in objectivity, exclaiming to filmmaker Chris Marker: ‘This world is in endless war! The artist has to choose his camp and fight for victory. The rest is baloney!’30 The bad faith of a generation of grand theoreticians (let’s include here some of the film practitioners among the French new wave) is unlikely to be surmounted by the similarly coded and politically loaded agenda of the mild-mannered research propounded by these authors. As Benjamin cites Nietzsche: ‘we need history, but not the way a spoiled loafer in the garden of knowledge needs it’.31 This condensation of the subjective and the structural is textual history and ‘[e]ven if we accept as in the main I do,’ affirms Said, ‘... that there is no way to get past texts in order to apprehend “real” history directly – it is still possible,’ he argues, ‘to say that such a claim need not also eliminate interest in the events and circumstances entailed by and expressed in themselves. Those events and circumstances are textual too ...’32 This history-textuality dichotomyhas all too often pointed to a fallacious split between theory and practice, between the many and various texts and the agents, the real agency that might otherwise take their place. As Young has put it, ‘a historical analysis of the terms of the theory/history debate shows that far from being radically opposed positions, both sides have in fact been working from a common problematic’.33 It is no coincidence that some academics avowedly do history and theory, while some are content simply to observe it ...

All I want is to enter my house justified In Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962), two ageing cowboys, Steve Judd (Joel McCrae) and Gill Westrum (Randolf Scott), reunite as hired guns to ensure the safe passage of a shipment of gold. Judd rides into town to take up his commission and encounters Westrum, not seen in years. Old friends meet in something of a carnival of modern contradictions – cars, crowds and ‘Western’ sideshows, in the last of which Judd spies Westrum (the ‘West’ incarnate) playing a parody of himself. Judd needs a hand and hires Westrum and his young sidekick to assist him in the deed. But a lot of time and experience has passed between these men; while Westrum secretly covets and plans to steal the gold he’s been paid to guard, Judd remains true to his word. Westrum reckons pride and a sense of righteousness keeps Judd to his word as he sows the seed of a scam, but it’s plain Judd plans to carry out the task with which

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First Person Reflection 13

Writing Diaspora in the West

he was charged. They’re at a crossroads – which way modernity? which way riches? – and they reflect on the ethical value of pride, self-worth and the elusive valency of a life well lived. Westrum to Judd: ‘Partner, you know what’s on the back of a poor man when he dies? The clothes of pride, and they are not a bit warmer to him dead than when he was alive. Is that you want, Steve?’ Judd’s famous ethical riposte: ‘All I want is to enter my house justified.’34 This film is a sideshow classic in the cultural studies pantheon and is much studied, especially for its seminal (if altogether unwitting) ruminations on postmodernity – the pastiche of the cowboy, looming modern times, moral crossroads, and so on. This crossroads western offers now, as it did then, some salutary notes for its liberal intellectual critic, but an apparently all too rational response to its carnival of (post)modern contradictions. Judd enters the twentieth century a man; however conflicted, however jilted by his own past and now unfashionable perspective, he holds fast to a Romantic provenance. At the final showdown – typically a gunfight – Westrum and Judd are on the same side, outnumbered by their moral opposites and holed up in a ravine. Westrum to Judd, with resignation: ‘Partner, what do you think?’ Judd: ‘Let’s meet ’em head on, half way, just like always.’ Judd goes down fighting; Westrum survives, a changed man. Judd’s pride is not vanity and his humility deeply affects his old friend who, despite their odds, defends him to the death. This is a Romantic and modern fiction, an admixture ripe for postmodern picking, but while Judd indeed ‘enters his house justified’, his interpreters stay holed up, cowed in the ravine; refusing to take anything head on, refusing to fight, much less die for their position. They are left at the crossroads ... a mean between extremes. While taking a look at the subjective constructs that came to forge the view of what can only loosely here be called the structuralist critic – the gaze, apparatuses and other institutions of ideology – Joan Copjec draws our attention to Foucault’s popular missive on power and ideology via discussion of Bentham’s penal ‘Panopticon’ and ‘ “the simple economic geometry” which builds it as a “house of certainty” ’.35 In her critique of Foucault, Copjec touches on a point more than germane to the accommodations at play in postcolonial and marginalist cultural theory, observing that the ‘Panopticon is composed of spaces rigorously separated,’ that its ‘driving purpose is control, discipline ... meticulous detail,’ and ‘well-plotted and repetitious ritual’.36 The implication here is not that of rigour or of some suggestion of the realwerk of textual viewing/reading, but of a certain contradiction

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at play in its loose appropriations in cultural theory (here she is writing specifically on screen theory) and the extent to which such an avowedly liberal intellectual tradition is in fact beholden to rigid discursive enterprise. Seemingly disingenuously, she asks: ‘Has anyone ever said before that the Panopticon prison is a house built by obsession? Or wondered how this pathology might also inform Foucault’s argument?’ Copjec here points out her concern that such a criticism may be a ‘slippery path to explore, one which Freud himself warns against, warning of the difficulty of comparing large order social phenomena (the level of Foucault’s analysis) with individual neurosis. Freud persists in the comparison, nevertheless,’ she points out, ‘attempting to think through some of the contradictions which arise in the process.’37 Spivak, on this very point, goes further, arguing that Foucault is inadequately informed by the possibility that his ruminations on power may reinscribe the very imperialism he wishes to explode: ‘He is taken in by the restricted version of the West produced by that reinscription and thus helps to consolidate its effects ... Sometimes it seems,’ she seems to be answering Copjec here, ‘as if the very brilliance of Foucault’s analysis of the centuries of European imperialism produces a miniature version of that heterogeneous phenomenon: management of space ... all seem to be screen-allegories that foreclose a reading of the broader narratives of imperialism’.38 The reflective apparatus may be seen to engender not only the constructions of normative narrative, of the culture and the canon that remain the butt of literary and cultural criticism, but the constructions of marginal criticism and, in some cases, institutionalized minority discourse. It is no coincidence that these critics, in the main and with an increasing armoury of politically, philosophically and theoretically overdetermined tropes, emerge from academies of the Arts and Letters with an eye cast squarely on concerns of culture. Writing of the highly overdetermined language of German existentialism (specifically, here, Heidegger) and the extent to which its jargon of authenticity, he argues, ultimately sponsored authoritarianism (Fascism) through its very claims to authenticity (yes, in the Greek, in metaphysics), Adorno argued: ‘Language provides it with a refuge. Within this refuge a smoldering evil expresses itself as though it were a salvation.’39 The narrative construct of the house – more properly the home – becomes a compelling one and brings us properly to the subject of marginalist discourse and its architecture. Homi Bhabha rationalizes his own critical project with such a construct and with the rider that he attempts to show us, ‘to show you the world forcibly entering the house

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First Person Reflection 15

Writing Diaspora in the West

of fiction in order to invade, alarm, divide, dispossess ... to show how literature haunts history’s more public face, forcing it to reflect on itself in the displacing, even distorting image of Art’.40 He sets the stage at the outset, borrowing the tremulous conceit of the house of fiction from Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. ‘In the House of Fiction you can hear, today,’ says Bhabha, ‘the deep stirring of the “unhomely” ... The unhomely is the shock of recognition of the world-in-the home, the home-in-the-world.’41 The house of fiction, for Bhabha (and James) contains the means of its own invasion, division or dispossession, the home containing its very own unhomeliness, the ‘deep stirring’ that portends the ‘sites for history’s most intricate invasions’.42 Bhabha here points to Freud’s unheimlich: ‘... the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, familiar;’ he quotes Freud, ‘the prefix “un” [“un-“] is the token of repression.’43 Freud, speaking of Schelling’s use of the term, points out that ‘all is unheimlichkeit that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.’44 For Freud, while the unhomely, the uncanny leans towards the obscure horizon, a place of ghouls and villains, it is only thus because what we find there, what we feel there was in fact once close to us – that is, that which was once too close for comfort. Home, like the culture that bears it, always and inherently contains what is unhomely and to this extent they are effectively interchangeable. For Gaston Bachelard, the house is constituted of images that, with the aid of the original contemplation of the daydream, give us the illusion of stability. Its verticality is registered along with our own being as that of centrality – it appeals to our notion and our need to be grounded. We already know the distance between cellar and attic is cast in this verticality, but the house also has windows and doors, of which we are only too aware, yet in its midst we find intimacy. But even while Bachelard is more sanguine about the centrality of home for being’s sensibilities, he recognizes that by this very psycho-phenomenological insinuation it avails itself of potential invasion and rupture – as it is subjected to storms and other invasions, its intimacy entertains the immensity of the universe: ‘Through the poets window the house converses about immensity with the world. And as metaphysicians would say, it too, the house of men, opens its doors to the world.’45 So Bhabha puts himself in the shoes of James’s heroine Isabel Archer as she takes in the existential horrors of her dwelling, the interdependent realms of world and self, and from here discerns the troubling tools of the modernist narrative. But this deep stirring discerned by Bhabha has always been there, however normative or hybrid its construction – and nowhere more so than in the canon of high modernity and its

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postmodern progeny. In its architecture is traceable a certain marginal and exilic affectivity, not only in the development of modern human subjectivity and its various stories, but in the perpetuation of the postmodern enterprise of a kind of mythical house of marginal fiction, always threatened by its own demise. The theme is developed with germane gravity in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972), translating the topology to the confines of the four walls of a Paris apartment. Bertolucci wanted to make his film about the solitude of an anonymous couple and have them alone within these four walls. But he realized ‘the couple in my film are not isolated from the world as I’d planned for them to be. You cannot escape to an island: even your attempt to do so is part of our social reality. It turns out that my characters are profoundly symptomatic. You can’t hide in a room; reality will come in through the window.’46 In a scene that exemplifies the pull between the inside (ideology) and the outside (reality) in this narrative of interiors, where Paul (Brando) and Jeanne (Schneider) have been holed up in a tryst that proves profoundly symptomatic, not only of this troubled couple, but of all who come to watch them play it out between these four walls, Jeanne wants out and announces her intention to decamp, to get out of this thing between them. Paul’s riposte? ‘Quo vadis, baby!?’ While she may indeed leave their pied-à-terre, the intersubjective hold is too strong – there is simply nowhere for her to go. Bertolucci’s love shack is precisely this house of marginal fiction, as threatened by its own demise as the relationship it tenuously holds together. Now this is a critical juncture, if not for the marginalists themselves; we are after all talking about cultural studies, which is as confused over the imitation of life in art as any other ‘discipline’. But what exactly is this house of fiction and how are its ramparts threatened or even shaken by these spruikers of rupture? For Bhabha, and a significant coterie of postcolonial and ‘committed critics’, this house finds its foundations shaken in literal renderings of marginal writings and metafictions, minority discourses and other representations that find themselves, at least look for themselves, at the margin. This marginalized house of fiction, with its many windows and multivious perspectives, resides, however, inextricably with the mansion of the literary canon that is most often the object of their scorn, turning Third Worldisms against First in a tautological struggle that quite often simply emerges as another variation on ‘this is the house that Jack (or, as the case may be, Henry) built’. Where Bhabha seeks rupture as the site of potential liberation for his Third World informants, Bertolucci sees it as the symptom or perversion of

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First Person Reflection 17

Writing Diaspora in the West

subjectivity itself, the house a site that merely gives it form, a place in which it might be sought and acted upon.47 On the transition from simple consciousness to true self-consciousness, Hegel wrote that ‘we have now passed into the native land of truth, into that kingdom where it is at home.’48 But this emergence to the self-conscious clearing of selfhood is not without its pitfalls since absolute self-knowing, even for Hegel, remains elusive. As Heidegger points out, the ‘absolute remains the extreme for self-consciousness. Knowing itself thus, self-consciousness knows itself as a knowledge which essentially struggles for the absolute, but in this struggle fights its way to a constant subjugation.’49 For Heidegger, anxiety is what declares being, discloses it as a particular and reflective solitude and in ‘anxiety one feels “uncanny” ... the “nothing” and the “nowhere”. But here “uncanniness” also means “not-being-at-home” ...’50 But in all this Hegel saw the human intellect in its ability to set limits, and in this capacity it begins the process of construction, erecting a building and placing ‘it between man and the Absolute [the complete reasoning and centre, beginning and end, the telos of being, reality], linking everything that man thinks worthy and holy to this building, fortifying it through all the powers of nature and talent and expanding it ad infinitum. The entire totality of limitations is to be found in it [the intellect], but not in the Absolute itself.’51 Now, the marginalist disposition needs an alibi, a theoretical underpinning – a rock, of sorts, on which its church may be founded – but has more often than not stumbled on the difficult theoretical rock between Nietzschean and Hegelian readings of culture and philosophy. Two antithetical camps of received theory (Nietzsche’s theoretical ‘downgoing’ (Untergehen) – holding out the hammer for the marginalist to begin to stove in the metaphysical and identitarian home – and Hegel’s dialectical overcoming (Aufhebung) – holding out the difficult charts by which that home might be found) have doubtless exerted a conflicting and critical influence on readings of culture and its resident subjects, particularly in the political, ideological and theoretical wash-up of the 1960s. It has been argued variously that Nietzsche was not much interested in Hegel, and, for that matter, is reputed to have neither read nor thought much of him.52 It is unlikely that Hegel was not at least on Nietzsche’s mind as he was himself, in a sense, one of the new kids on the Hegelian block. But, when Nietzsche brings his Zarathustra down from a mountain cave, the move is both symptomatic and prescient: ‘Behold! I am weary of my wisdom,’ he says, ‘... To that end I must descend into the

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depths ... I must go down – as men, to whom I want to descend, call it ... Thus began Zarathustra’s down-going.’53 In an apparent reversal of the sublative spirit (Aufhebung) of the ossified philosopher, Nietzsche, it appears, must go down (Untergehen) on Hegel. Nietzsche would say of the metaphysical project of the pantheon of German Idealism – the canonical figures of which he named Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Leibniz, Kant and even Schopenhauer – that ‘[i]n the history of knowledge the Germans are represented by nothing but ambiguous names, they have ever produced only “unconscious” false-coiners ... they are all mere Schleiermacher, mere veilmakers’.54 While it is unlikely that Nietzsche’s veilmakers are critiqued in the revised new syllabus of cultural studies today, the tenor of Nietzsche’s attitude to these pioneers of the constitutive subject, metaphysical as they are, prevails – that spirit is savaged, even when they do not call it by name. Heidegger had put it that ‘[l]anguage is the house of Being’ and that in ‘its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.’55 This dwelling runs like a leitmotif through his work, culminating in his lecture ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in which he shows the workings (to dwell is to build) of poetry and art as the true ‘house of Being’ – to build is to dwell, ‘building is really dwelling’ – the space in which Being meets its subject in history. While Heidegger runs with the metaphysical metaphor as a means to declare Being, defining language as the space (Raum) where Being comes to the subject, it is a space marked by boundaries and, as he argues, ‘the boundary is that from which something begins its essential unfolding’.56 Where Hegel saw ‘dichotomy as the source of the need of philosophy’ (the essence or need for philosophy itself and what it needs to conduct its sorties) and the ‘sole interest of Reason [as] to suspend rigid antitheses’57 (to close opposites on the horizon of philosophy; in a sense, to bring them home), Nietzsche (particularly, it seems, the new Nietzsche, the received Nietzsche of cultural studies) is viewed as the wandering bard, homeless and unbound by System or stricture. It is easy to see his appeal to the young and the mad and those theorists who would like to propagate those states of subjectivity. These bounds, and their effect on the subject as that which defines or appears to define our perceptual and ideological limits, are in fact well articulated by Nietzsche when he posits that ‘[i]f he [man] were able to get out of the prison walls of this faith, even for an instant only,’ and here comes the premise for the great escape from metaphysics, ‘his “self-consciousness” would be destroyed at once’.58 While Hegel is the builder, maybe like Ibsen’s Solness, Nietzsche and his acolytes remain the harbingers of the doom of this house he

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First Person Reflection 19

Writing Diaspora in the West

would build; a cultural studies blitz of sorts that threatens to raze it. In fact, they probably have. I wonder if they really want to go down on Hegel? We shall see. Speaking on the history of metaphysics as part of the defining moment of Derrida’s deconstructive announcement to the Americas, Spivak points out that ‘Derrida never really finished, or even undertook, that much promised deconstruction. He hasn’t been son of Heidegger in that respect. As for how deconstruction actually operates, it fixes on small things: margins, moments, and so on. But something unifying is needed ... As a fiction?,’ she is asked by one of her interlocutors. ‘As a necessary theoretical fiction which is a methodological presupposition,’ she replies, stressing that ‘the possibility of this fiction cannot be derived from some true account of things. If you take the theoretical formulation of deconstruction, you have a stalling at the beginning and a stalling at the end (différance at the beginning, and aporia at the end), so that you can neither properly begin nor properly end. Most of the people who are interested in deconstruction,’ she concludes, ‘are interested in these two things. But I’m more interested in what happens in the middle ...’59 It is precisely this stuff of the middle, the middle term (die Mitte), the appearance that mediates the machinery of history, of metaphysics, textuality, subjectivity, of dwelling that defines the margin as well as the Heimat ... we might just as well say the silent, silenced centre ... a place, just maybe, of reason. And Spivak is onto something here, despite her pivotal role in the advancement of the new marginalism. This theme is largely drawn from Aristotle, who argued the struggle across a mean between extremes led to a critical mediation that gave rise to human virtue. It must be put; the West to which these critics refer is no more Centre than frontier, here than there. While once, at the height of its dubious distinction, having the status of the Imperium (as if in absolute contradistinction to its counterparts in the East) and, perhaps, stood ground as some pan-logicist perspective, in strict terms it is indeed as arbitrary as the Orient, that nebulous other by which it is in fact defined. The terms are mutually inclusive by the very fact of their apparent opposition. No doubt, the West is the bearer of centrist themes, of structures and institutional machinery that assist in its advancement – this is its culture, the force of its history, and this it shares with its other term. But in this very advancement, East or West, inheres (im)precisely this middle ground, defining a certain proximity inherent in the very difference between the two. When Hegel enunciates the problem of selfconsciousness as the reflexive relation of self to other, of Being to the

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Real of its existence in History, he speaks of a play of forces at the centre of their distinction in extremes. Heidegger, mindful of this play of forces between extremes, brings them closer in the name of intimacy: ‘For world and things do not subsist alongside one another. They penetrate each other. Thus the two traverse a middle. In it, they are at one. Thus at one, they are intimate ... The intimacy of world and thing is not a fusion. Intimacy obtains only where the intimate – world and thing – divides itself cleanly and remains separated. In the midst of the two, in the between of world and thing ... division prevails.’60 And so it is that more than a little has been written, performed and filmed on the subject of marginality, exile and displacement. Concentrating mainly at the extremes of the concrete and the abstract, this writing – both on and of the margin – has explored at great length a sort of generalized semantic of displacement and difference, pursuing its dispossessed subjects to the frontiers of both culture and philosophy – what Bhabha might call ‘nation and narration’.61 But from the concrete of persons displaced by the various diasporas to the abstract of the existential ‘stranger’ who truly looks to wander, the literature tells us little of this apparently untranslatable identity. Coined by George Steiner, this untranslatability refers not to the inscrutability, the ineffability of the extraterritorial writer, but to such writers of extreme local strength as Shakespeare and Montaigne – solid and grounded within a culturally and linguistically isolated canon. For Steiner, the linguistic and cultural travails endured by a diversity of (particularly modern) writers forges a certain representational split, a necessary engagement and translation of identity: ‘It makes of Nabokov, Borges, and Beckett,’ he argues, ‘the three representative figures in the literature of exile – which is, perhaps, the main impulse in current literature.’62 So, for Steiner, the writer is extraterritorial to the extent that he is, in fact, translatable – that is, crossing the boundaries and margins of culture and language. Now, taking as read the very real experience of the displaced, it is precisely this difficulty in the translation of exile, of its very reading across culture, politics and textuality, that we may find the kernel of subjectivity. In spite of the weight given to the enterprise of deconstruction, this difficulty in translation, it seems, remains. And, given a certain sharing or overlap of terrain between theories of postcolonialism and poststructuralism, the difficulty is not only extant, but exacerbated – a certain marginal and exotic charm still obtains in this ‘translatable identity’. Something of this problematic is articulated in all its appropriate subtlety in Roman Polanski’s film Chinatown (1974). Seeking the

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First Person Reflection 21

Writing Diaspora in the West

whereabouts of his client Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), detective protagonist Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) barges into her house and is greeted by her Chinese maid protesting, ‘She no home! She no home!’ Gittes repeats this objection, mocking the maid’s English. But it is the maid’s protestation which foreshadows the key plot point in the film and, just maybe, its leitmotif. As Gittes locates Evelyn and a mysterious young girl who would hold the clue to the case he is working on – beating a hasty retreat to Mexico – he accuses her of lying to him. He demands to know who the girl is, slapping her as he goes. With each slap the response alternates: ‘She’s my sister!’ ‘She’s my daughter!’ And then the truth: ‘She’s my sister and my daughter!’ He discovers the kernel of the narrative that had been eluding him all along and the fact that his subject was indeed ‘no home’ – neither at home nor ever likely to find one. It is precisely this restlessness of knowing that is also at the core of marginalist tenuity – a position that can be maintained only in bad faith, a certain anguish before the realwerk of their exilic progenitors, those who paid the price. Again, the marginalist consciousness in fact incorporates the very anguish from which it takes flight.

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2 Once upon a Time, There Was a Country ...

‘Anyway, I’m finally crossing over, into the Third World, where I’ve always known I’ve belonged. I don’t know why.’ So goes the interior monologue at the close of Donald Cammell’s last film Wild Side (1995) as the female lead Alex (Anne Heche) crosses the Mexican border in the arms of a woman, Virginia (Joan Chen). Having worked as a merchant banker and being confronted with the option of having to ‘turn tricks’ with her male clients in order to keep her job, Alex turns hooker of her own accord. She wants her lifestyle and, she says, a little integrity. But in so doing she falls into a web of criminal intrigue and she wants out. Succumbing to the wiles of Virginia, the money-laundering pawn of her gangster husband Bruno (Christopher Walken), Alex finds herself stitched into an elaborate scam from which, it appears, there is little chance of escape. But Alex and Virginia hatch a scam of their own, escaping to the margin Alex had always longed for. Casting a glance over her sleepy new Oriental lover as they escape over the border into Mexico, Alex comes to the realization that she belongs at the margin of her own existence, that she belongs in exile and she will write her own borders. While Alex was indeed heading south in the arms of a woman, this was not exactly the film Cammell had in mind. Feigning failure to comprehend the film, arguing it made no apparent structural or commercial sense, financial backers NuImage were already well at work cutting it as a straight-to-video lesbian exploitation flick when Cammell put a gun to his head in 1996. ‘They were excited by the fact that there was a lot of lesbian sex,’ says Frank Mazzola, Cammell’s editor and long-time collaborator. ‘They were probably thinking, great ... we’ve just got to get rid 23

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Of Home and Hearth: Maps, Histories and Territorial Claims

Writing Diaspora in the West

of all the extraneous stuff, i.e., the intelligence.’1 Now here’s a scenario: Cammell’s final film – while of interest if only for the director’s notoriety, especially for his collaboration with Nicolas Roeg on their cult film Performance and friendship and collaboration with Marlon Brando on the failed Fan-Tan, but also for his own taste for young women, drugs and counter-culture – is itself of little importance here. It does, however, provide a near-perfect paradigm for the emergence of a new, cynical and similarly exploitative system or industry in Academe. Cammell’s attention to the sexual and existential liminality of Alex’s character was further exploited in the service of this very same marginality – it is fashionable, chic, though she ‘doesn’t know why’. Regardless of Cammell’s and NuImage’s apparent divergence, we have here a narrative – a sort of middle-class border writing – an author (here a director, an auteur, even), a subject marginalized in her own homeland and a system of representation based on exploitation. We have a plot and various interested positions – that is, author, subject, a distributor, a viewer and a milieu in which all are imbricated in the very same corrupted subject position. The narrative is calculated to take us away from the hearth and down a course of existential and representative transcendence. The plot points are tied; we are with her all the way. And herein lies the problem. Hal Hartley’s film Henry Fool (1997) was on to this. Henry, a self-styled writer/philosopher/art critic/bum (some perverse incarnation of Ignatius Riley from John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces) finds himself in the company and good graces of a kind of garbage man savant, the aptly named Simon Grim. Henry moves in, taking sexual liberties with Simon’s depressive mother and kooky sister as he does. Henry is a street-smart miscreant with literary pretensions – he’s been lugging his own well-thumbed, misunderstood and unpublished volumes for years. Henry is convinced the unassuming Simon should turn his hand to the literary himself, to bring to light the inner tensions of the working man. To his surprise, Henry is convinced Simon has crafted some literary brilliance of which he could only dream. In a moment of intellectual (or reflective) generosity he encourages Simon to present his massive poetic tome to a New York publishing house – and so he does. Simon’s arrival at the firm and his somewhat manic presentation cause a minor stir, sending an executive assistant to interrupt an editorial meeting. Laura advises of the arrival of a ‘particularly wound up young garbage man’ who is clutching a poem, a rather long poem (suitably in the tradition of the high modern canon). She reminds the editors how they’d stressed the need ‘to be on the lookout for marginalised verse, from unestablished quarters of the American scene’. Somewhat perplexed, the chief editor

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tells her to make an appointment, after which Simon’s marginalized verse propels him to literary fame. The only thing certain about the strength or quality of Simon’s work is that it makes him famous – the strength of Hartley’s film is that we never get to see it – that its marginal status is precisely the means of his success. This very same cynicism, its representative transcendence and its marginal verse, obtain in near to all cultural theory in the Humanities today. I want to take a look here at something of a fork in the road of Theory and its various diluted and bastardized forms that have emerged victorious in the Humanities and social sciences in recent years (notably, the enterprises of poststructuralist and postcolonial theorizing and, specifically, the point at which they merge in cultural studies). This move to transcendence, this avowed transgression of the normative – a kind of voluntarist exile in anti-identitarianism – appears in the new marginalism and this has been emerging with conspicuous faddishness over the past few decades or so. Key to this transcendence is a rising chorus of minority cant pitched in the (often plausible) discursive manner of its progenitor – that which once was considered high theory, or Bordwell and Carroll’s Grand Theory. But this particular disposition would seem to abnegate any notion of real positionality, political, theoretical or otherwise. Relatively recent theories and readings of culture and criticism (viz. cultural studies and its consanguine theoretical disciplines born, by and large, of various incantations of continental philosophy, postmodern theorizing, postcolonial and development theory and comparative literature) have lauded this marginalized verse, courting its authors in what now amounts to an institutionalized Third Worldism – a cultural, political and theoretical minoritarianism now itself next-door to normative in its scope and influence. In the wake of the highly politicized and committed identification of postcolonial nations with a collective Third World – the followers of Fanon, the postcolonial pantheon of the Non-Aligned Movement postWorld War II, and so on – fashion and arguably a certain First World embarrassment led a good number of First World intellectuals to take umbrage at what they portrayed as some centrist and subordinating construct of ‘the wretched of the Earth’. Not coincidently, First World intellectuals and venture capitalists alike found themselves intoning such normative nomenclature as the ‘developing world’ or ‘developing countries’. Born largely of the sociology and theories of development and certain strands of international relations, the notion of a developing country was comforting to all points of the political compass but the very one it described (not that Third World intellectuals ever took

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Of Home and Hearth

Writing Diaspora in the West

on a mantle other than Third Worldism, as it was for them a rallying cry for anticolonialism and the marginalized). At their worst, well-meaning (the sociological endeavour was, it must be said, aimed at a more sophisticated and critical approach to globalization and modes of production in the so-called international division of labour) and committed critics tended to cast these regions as somewhat quaint, ‘relatively less modernised societies’.2 And, while the by now standard UN-countenanced ‘less developed countries (LDCs)’ ushered in by the new international division of labour is doubtless an accurate description, its intonation would not sit well with counterhegemonic discourse which seeks to simultaneously erase distance and difference. But then, this is just one of the many contradictions afoot for the mercurial marginalist. This is, of course, in itself nothing new to the Academy – succour has been taken from its warm glow for centuries. And marginalism itself is hardly novel. Certain radical schools, some with advanced theoretical underpinning, have marched under this banner since the end of World War II, adopting political positions, siding with causes, some fighting real battles. Such radical chic may be glimpsed to tragi-comic effect in Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2005), when the apocryphal Mossad avengers of the Munich Olympics massacre in 1972 are holed up in a ‘safe house’ in Athens before they hit their next target. They are roused from their sleep by a PLO terrorist cell given directions to the same safe house. Guns are pulled from all corners of the room with one of the Mossad crew pointing to himself declaring he is ‘ETA! ETA! Basque!’ while the head of the Arabs (from Oman) bangs his chest: ‘PLO! PLO!’ As the guns are tentatively lowered, a PLO member asks who these other ideological soldiers are, to which the febrile reply comes: ‘ETA, Basque. Red Army Faction. ANC, African. African,’ each nation’s then radicals pointed out in a litany of badges and positions, strangely joined in the same cause under the one roof. We have a UN of terrorists in a safe house! As they doze one of the PLO tunes into some Arabic music on the radio. The (South African) Israeli changes the station. The Arab changes it back. They square off before the Israeli tunes into Al Green’s ‘Let’s Stay Together’. The stand-off is over to the perfectly paradoxical tune of American soul (Radio Free Europe?). Again, in discussion with Foucault, and in 1972, Deleuze put it that ‘every partial revolutionary attack or defense is linked in some way to the workers’ struggle’3 – a fashionably wayward remark that would bear little resemblance to any real workers’ struggle. Revolutionary action may well have everything to do with class struggle but it is doubtful, for example, that the terrorism of the Munich Olympics had anything to

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do with workers, be they in the West Bank, Oman or Lebanon. The distinction between the ‘attacks’ perpetrated by workers’ struggles (organized or not) and the various nationalisms to which their struggle might, even tenuously, be tied has been deliberately blurred in the political and theoretical fug of 1960s romanticism. But some things have changed – a certain distaste for violent recourse doubtless emerged from the atrocity exhibition at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the alltoo-numerous bloody skyjackings and ideological assassinations perpetrated by bourgeois children in the West during the late 1960s and 1970s. The systematic state-sponsored surveillance and annihilation of the proponents of ‘ideological armed struggle for world revolution’ soon followed, to the extent that such struggle would largely be confined to relatively national boundaries in Third World regions with nationalist aspirations ... until, that is, the terrorist onslaught on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon of 11 September 2001. Since this time, Deleuze’s easy allusions to partial attack and defence being inextricably linked to the workers’ struggle have served the marginalist agenda. As distinctions between classes get easily rolled up into distinctions between borders and nations, the marginalist is given the cosy privilege of distance, from which to serve up facile analyses requiring neither partial attack nor defence, on their part, merely a perspective – a perfect distance. The twist here is the fact that the new marginalist approaches a position so tenuous it serves only the renunciation of position: the marginalist must refuse to take up any real position lest that position hold out the promise, even the possibility, of some intellectual responsibility (or danger). This is, at best, paradoxical given the political cachet this tenuity proffers in recent (well, since the 1960s) and current academic climes and so it is no coincidence that indeed some positionality – a certain distanced identification with the marginalized, the politics of identity – has been creatively eked. Paradox notwithstanding, the new marginalist seeks first to relate to and identify with some figure of alienation or extraordinary otherness. These are invariably drawn from the ranks of subalternity, the alienated and the vanquished – lost souls staring from innumerable galleries and exhibitions of mostly modern horror. The troops mobilized by the United States in response to the events of 9/11 have served the new marginalist well, the distaste for violence compounded, the expression of violence once again at the hand of the putative oppressor, the imperialist, the hegemon. So, we have a new campus and in its crux the materialization of an inverted rendition of real marginal experience, of exile, alienation,

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Of Home and Hearth

Writing Diaspora in the West

migration, dispersion and dispossession. Having identified, adopted and ultimately usurped the very subject position of their lost or victimized other (and so effacing their own), the marginalists have transcended the mantle of their own subject position and raised themselves to the position of their host subject, simultaneously privileging the place of their own identification and silencing it. In an open letter to students involved in a particularly violent clash with police in Rome in March 1968, Pier Paolo Pasolini struck a political raw nerve within his own political ranks when he posited the protestations of this young and fashionable élite – the ‘sacred hooliganism’ of avowedly marginalized radicals – as both childish posturing and a sort of perverse acting out of their own bourgeois provenance and bearing. He scolds: Now the journalists of all the world (including those of television) kiss (as I believe one still says in the language of the Universities) your ass. Not me, friends. You have the faces of spoiled children. Good blood doesn’t lie. You have the same bad eye. You are scared, uncertain, desperate (very good!) But you also know how to be bullies, blackmailers, and sure of yourselves; petit-bourgeois prerogatives, friends. When yesterday at the Valle Giulia you fought with policemen, I sympathized with the policemen! Because policemen are children of the poor. They come from the outskirts, be they rustic or urban. .... At the Valle Giulia, yesterday, we have thus had a fragment of class conflict; and you my friends (even though on the side of reason), were the rich, while the policemen (who were in the wrong) were poor. A nice victory, then, yours!4 In Pasolini’s ‘apology’ – a prose postscript to his ‘open letter poem’ – it stands more as a rationale for his ardour, and the ‘ugly verses’ he argues are inadequate to the task of his renunciation; it is a proper and ironical

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For a young person of today things are different: for him it is much more difficult to look at the bourgeoisie objectively through the eyes of another social class. Because the bourgeoisie is triumphing, it is transforming both the workers and the ex-colonial peasants into bourgeois. In short, through neo-capitalism the bourgeoisie is becoming the human condition. Those who were born into this entropy cannot in any way, metaphysically, be outside of it. It’s over. For this I provoke the young. They are, presumably, the last generation which sees workers and peasants; the next generation will only see bourgeois entropy around itself.5 While the real subjects of marginal experience will at all costs hold to some position, even a tenuous foothold at the edge of some desired homeland or other, marginalists advance by means of a thoroughgoing disavowal of position: eschewing the very positionality they hold (real subject position, responsibility, self-reflexivity, anti-identitarian, even) in favour of one with which they will come only to identify. Any potential position of critical enunciation – the apparent reason for their identification in the first place – is simply null: the proud new doves of cultural studies fulminating in the shadows of their own reflection. As Allan Bloom insightfully observed of well-paid professors at a rally at Cornell University in 1969, fawning at the feet of their new minority audience while at the same time being menaced by certain provocateurs in their midst: ‘Servility, vanity and lack of conviction are not difficult to discern.’6 Marco Bellochio’s Good Morning, Night (Buongiorno, notte) (2003), a film based on the kidnapping and assassination of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978 (a neat decade after Pasolini wrote his admonishing lines), explores this ‘bourgeois entropy’ with suitable elegance. As Moro is held in a makeshift hiding place in a Rome apartment, one of the protagonists, Chiara (Maya Sansa), begins to grapple with the ethical consequences of her actions. Presenting a respectable, traditional (‘reactionary’) front for the terrorist cell, she poses as the girlfriend of one of the young brigadisti, holds down a dreary job in a library and babysits for one of her new neighbours. She has taken a position but one with which she cannot identify. As Moro’s ‘people’s trial’

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positioning rather than apologia – he argues, with some prescience, that the political terrain (under the heavy strain of neocapitalism, of globalization, postmodernism, even) is, in a sense, consuming itself, before its subjects’ own blinkered eyes:

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begins to unfold, Chiara begins to lose any clarity she might have had on the issue. She dreams of Moro wandering freely around her apartment, compulsively looks in on him and sheds tears as he writes to his Party, to the Pope and his last testament. Pasolini’s prescience? ‘It’s over!’7 In an eloquent screed against this intellectual culture, George Armstrong Kelly summed up the apparent Zeitgeist (as of 1973) neatly, if impolitely, suggesting it be stubbed out like the fag-end of the linguistic fashion and philosophical cant it resembled: I have often stopped to wonder why I hated the word ‘alienation’ so deeply, but it is only in the past few days that I spread this problem out in a way I could grasp it. First of all, I suppose, there was the subjective feeling of two sorts. One: an uncharitable mistrust of the sophists and activists, the keepers and weepers of this world who dote on the appeals and tortures of alienation. I say appeals and tortures, because ours is the first age since the time of the religious flagellants when the pursuit of felicity has been problematically connected with the espousal of pain. Two: because I have sometimes feared that I myself was a fashionable product of this world, more royalist than the king, more alienation-prone than the alienists. I have come to see that these two approaches are, at best, a clumsy beginning. Next, there is the imposture of the word. When one says alienation, one literally does not know quite what is happening to the self, the soul, or the society, even if one has pored for long hours over the Phenomenology [of Hegel] and the Paris Manuscripts [of Marx], not to mention the bargain-basement literature of our deep contemporaries.8 The privileging of this marginalized verse rides on an argument of some new metaphysical critique in which any possibility of a grounded subject is rejected by means of a relatively old philosophical nihilism, an erasure of subjectivity including, and paradoxically, the very subject the marginalist seeks to occupy. Such a critique, of course, necessitates at least a cursory reading of philosophy – at least something of the philosophy of reflection, phenomenology, metaphysics, the Greeks ... But a metaphysics of the margins proves difficult to muster and, for the marginalist, serves only the purpose of its own denegation – a nihilism possibly born of infantile impatience and theoretical imposture. ‘In the hands of post-poststructuralists,’ writes Jusdanis, ‘culture becomes a hermeneutics of negation rather than a safety net against anomie ... Instead of offering the “superior” cultural values of love, intimacy, and aesthetic

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contemplation, as was the case with humanism, cultural studies provides radical critique.’9 The espoused counterhegemonic enterprise is a downer and it is fashionable. Theoretical imposture but also theoretical impasse. In a more populist scenario, the bargain-basement cult hero cop ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan remonstrated with his superiors for appointing an affirmative action policewoman to detective rank and to act as his partner, to keep an eye on him, in James Fargo’s The Enforcer (1976): ‘That’s a hell of a price to pay for being stylish!’ he scorned. And he was on to something; there’s a price to be paid.

I am in anguish in order to flee it In his well-worn Orientalism, Edward Said touched on a sort of Orientalist dream-work motif, drawing a (fruitful) distinction between what he called manifest orientalism – ‘the various stated views about Oriental society, languages, literatures, history, sociology’, and so on – and latent Orientalism: an ‘unconscious (and certainly untouchable) positivity’ – the expression (or repression) of a fantasy or a desire for the Orient’s feminine penetrability and supine malleability.10 Following Said’s line of argument, a similar discursive pattern can be seen in certain declaratively postcolonial or marginalist intellectual positions. Here we have a manifest marginalism – ‘the various stated views about marginalised cultures, minority discourses, literatures, history’, and so on – and, more importantly, a latent marginalism: the unconscious expression of a fantasy or a desire to be or to have the deracinated other’s ‘feminine penetrability’ and ‘supine malleability’. Here, the miscegenation of which the (distantiated) postcolonial or marginalist critic speaks and writes so often can be seen for what it truly is: a means of critical penetration, a pathology of inversion, again, not unlike Kristeva’s fantasy of incorporation. This affectivity is at the core of a certain meta-exile – an exilic paradox – as the marginalist comes to occupy a vast array of new racial, existential, sexual and/or geopolitical territory, an embarrassment of minoritarian riches from which he or she duly chooses, which he or she adapts to and wilfully adopts. But this positionality is, again, tenuous: an inversion of truly marginalized experience as the marginalist negotiates the encroaching terrain of a psychopathological homeland and one, at that, which can be maintained only in the infantile privilege of bad faith. And with it comes a certain anguish before the realwerk of their marginal progenitors, they who paid the price. Here, the marginalist

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is in danger of becoming the ‘down-side’ of the marginal equation. In seeking to flee from the stare of this down-side (the putative ‘other’, the object-ego of reflective philosophy), the marginalist consciousness in fact incorporates the very anguish from which it unwittingly takes flight. Sartre rendered Hegel here, arguing that ‘the nihilating power at the heart of anguish’ is dispensed with by means of a radical renunciation, a repressive turn that while having the potential to decentre – to turn the subject on itself, reflexively, self-consciously – plays at filling the void that confronts it: ‘I am in anguish in order to flee it.’ Sartre here is speaking of the down-side, the ‘nihilating power’ of all consciousness, an ‘attitude’ he famously termed ‘bad faith (mauvaise foi)’.11 The one who seeks to identify with the margin (particularly other subjects who still live or subsist there) renders the viewer’s homeland itself the site of alienation; and the margin, the myth of an impossible realization. While subjectivity, like all narrative, appears as a labour of reconstruction of fundamentally irreconcilable opposites, its ambiguous emergence is that of a kind of exilic homeland which neither it nor its subject nor its truly marginalized brethren will ever experience. It is fantasy which projects plenitude in the face of representational failure and, for the marginalist, the fantasy is one of exile or displacement. But, against the odds of tenuity, the fantasizing subject must maintain a foothold, perform its own representative closure in order to maintain a perspective on self. The machinations of the voyeur here are signature – in the elimination of distance they forge subjective closure and therefore the possibility of their (the viewer/theoretician’s) very existence. The marginalists’ bad faith fantasies are assayed against their own increasingly febrile critique of the tenuous formation of the subject, Third World or First. This is, of course, just another theoretical thorn in the side of the critic in question. ‘Subjectivity’ – like numerous other sides to this cultural and critical issue – is a slippery path, leading inexorably to some engagement or other with philosophical and political questions already explored by a vast array of rigorous thought and its thinkers. And besides, it is no longer fashionable ... Certain discourses on marginalization and displacement have become discourses of marginalization and displacement, themselves locked in a perverse logic of identification with the very subjects of their own intellectual endeavours. In an attempt to locate the subject of the margins at the margins these theorists invest, identify and attempt to adopt a particular marginal, minority position of their own. Operating here is a fundamental contradiction: the liberal intellectual seeks the right of

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repatriation for their exile, marginalized other (the demand for a grounded, housed subject – the subject of a ‘homeland’ rightfully due) while celebrating the minority discourse of the ‘deracinated other’ as true representative of the human subject. Seeking intellectual, political and sexual solace in a subject they can never and will never know – that, in fact, for them never existed – intellectuals seek a repatriation of their own. Rey Chow, herself an avowed critic of ‘cultural otherness’, has referred to some such critics as ‘brokers in diaspora’, arguing how they themselves have been caught up in the forces of intellectual production, how they have to do with the problematic of the post-colonial discursive space in which many ‘third world’ intellectuals who choose to live in the ‘first world’ function. Within that space these intellectuals are not only ‘natives’ but spokespersons for ‘natives’ in ‘the third world’ ... the prosperity of that space is closely tied up with the vast changes taking place in Western academic institutions, notably in North America, where many intellectuals ‘of color’ are serving as providers of knowledge about their nations and cultures. The way these intellectuals function is therefore inseparable from their status as cultural workers/brokers in diaspora, which may be a result of graduate studies, research, visiting or permanent appointments, immigration, and, in some cases, exile or political asylum.12 Here, in a chapter titled ‘Against the Lures of Diaspora: Minority Discourse, Chinese Women, and Intellectual Hegemony’, she argues that, indeed, this problematic advances a ‘minority discourse’ of its own. But, just at the point at which she appears about to unpick that very problematic she sights the enemy and falls back on that same, perhaps comforting, discourse of the minority, for they, you see, create a situation in which ‘ “women” are not a legitimate scholarly concern’, a ‘tactic’ by which the ‘enemy’, for one thing, can forge ‘an habitual myopia’ towards these concerns.13 Her argument is initially compelling but quickly becomes circuitous and contradictory, as she conveniently fails to locate herself as a player within the very brokerage she seeks to counter. Important in the new marginalism is the appearance or masking of a certain fantasy not only of incorporation but of rupture: a kind of projection on a subject divided and alienated by the very centre and logic that define such division. The metaphysical lures of post-Enlightenment thinking hold, even for the marginalist at hand. The question remains: looking at this fantasy of incorporation, what are they afraid of? If we

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look closely we might sense some theoretical vertigo – a little close to the edge, the theorist simultaneously entertains the possibility of jumping and recoils with horror at the possibility. Perhaps it is as simple as Nietzsche would have had it, the cowardice of him ‘who takes flight in the face of reality’.14 But reflexive incorporation and rupture are effected by the same means and so it may well be argued that fear is central to these aims – incorporation and rupture, inherently one. Jean-Luc Godard’s placement of Brazilian director Glauber Rocha in his 1970 agitprop film Vent d’est is signal here. Godard’s pregnant revolutionary (Anne Wiazemsky) wanders a dusty path, movie camera in hand, and encounters Rocha – suitably, at a crossroads – arms outstretched as a kind of crucified political conductor. ‘Pardon me for disturbing you during your class struggle,’ the young revolutionary says, ‘I know it’s very important, but which way to political cinema?’ Rocha points in various directions before pointing out the way of ‘aesthetic adventure and philosophical enquiry’ (political cinema) and then the way of ‘Third World cinema, a dangerous cinema, divine and marvellous,’ he tantalizes, ‘where the questions are practical ones like production, distribution, training ...’15 The young filmmaker embarks on the path toward Third World cinema as the truly political one. But she has misgivings and, as a red ball crosses her path, she kicks it before turning back on Rocha, down the path to ‘aesthetic adventure and philosophical enquiry’, but the ball comes back to her like some pestering French poodle. Rocha remains, arms outstretched, at the crossroads where, it seems, Godard hung him out to dry. Rocha’s Third World cachet was seemingly both borrowed and plundered in the service of Godard’s filmic didacticism. According to Rocha, the pair met in Rome while Godard was angling for production money for the film and the latter urged the Brazilian to join him and his gang of student radical ‘advisers’ – including activists Daniel Cohn-Bendit (story and script) and Maoist adjutant Jean-Pierre Gorin (the latter his co-signatory to the cinematic nom de guerre Groupe Dziga Vertov) – in their effort to ‘destroy cinema’. Rocha countered that he was out to ‘build cinema in Brazil and the Third World, to handle very practical problems of production, distribution, etc.’. As MacBean recounted it, ‘this argument seems to have given Godard the idea of shooting the “Rocha at the crossroads” sequence ... as a way of delineating divergent revolutionary strategies. Rocha agreed to play his part, although he indicated his reluctance at “joining the collective mythology of the unforgettable French May-Gang” ’.16 So, we have a situation in which a card-carrying member of the Third World in the real encounters the First World radical intellectual with

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a tacit agreement to engage with the very machinery that demarcates them, that sets them apart – a potentially critical and salutary border writing. The Third World intellectual sees a building, perhaps with windows to capture the view and take in the breeze and maybe a refrigerator stocked with food, maybe some beers – a space from which constructive action can be planned, strategies mapped; the First World intellectual sees only rubble, the rupture and the remnants of a system – Third World or First – razed by their actions. They might not throw bombs but they run with scissors and do nobody any favours. And they did the same to vanguard Czech filmmaker Vera Chytilová in their Pravda made the same year and to Jane Fonda in A Letter to Jane in 1972. Godard clandestinely shot footage within Czechoslovakia in March 1969 and, with Gorin, edited what was purported to be a ‘concrete analysis of a concrete situation’. This ‘analysis’ concluded that the Czechs, under the sway of ‘political revisionism’ (Soviet suppression), were ‘not thinking correctly’. During an interview with Chytilová the narrator advises that she is not ‘speaking correctly’, that she speaks ‘like Arthur Penn or Antonioni’.17 Clearly Chytilová was suffering from a case of too much ‘style’ for Godard–Gorin, despite her political leaning. As to Fonda, they plundered her reputation as an activist, with the aim of reducing her to a mere actrine (fair enough), over a photograph published in the French magazine L’Express of her ‘interview’ (‘interrogation’) of North Vietnamese Army regulars (NVA) on her tour of Vietnam in 1972. To be sure, Fonda here has the patronizing mien that only the bad faith of a liberal intellectual can muster; dressed in fatigues, uncomfortably fumbling with a camera around her neck, she appears to be nodding to some intonation or other by one of a small huddle of NVA. In a classic piece of photo-journalism, the Vietnamese are in the foreground, the shot taken over their heads to capture the downward, concerned gaze of their interlocutor – we merely see the backs of their pith helmets. While Godard–Gorin succeed in pointing out the embarrassed liberal in ‘Hanoi Jane’, this clumsy cheap shot of text and image merely exposes their own cheap rhetoric of political rectitude, particularly so since they’d used her Hollywood cachet to their own Brechtian ends in their Tout va bien earlier that same year. It must be put that the impulse of this liberal intellectual tendency to subaltern identification lies in this fantasy not of the margin, not of the Third World, but of the Centre – that is, a fantasy of a true homeland. The impossibility of (a heimlich) plenitude is masked or re-rendered by the very possible solidity of such a homeland, fleshed out (through fantasy) of a basic impossibility and a necessary void. Indeed, without

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acknowledgement of this essentially metaphysical trait of the exilic imagination – the subject constructed in the failed representation of its own metaphysical closure; the existential alibi – theory fails to give a satisfactory account of subjectivity and representation at large. And so it does. The anti-identitarian turn plays on the themes of rupture and alienation, the omnipresent notion of the deconstructive postulated in the overdetermined logic of poststructuralist theory. The anti-identitarian agenda is nothing but a ruse. This too has particular implications for the nature of and relation between various manifestations and propositions of modernist and postmodernist constructs. While plotting the course of various signs and narratives of displacement and dislocation – of some break with the political father – the concern for the new marginalist in fact lies with the construction of the centre, precisely this homeland, the very centripetal locus that allows for the possibility of any writing, or reading, of the margin, any transformation of space into place, of other into self. This is indeed true of all who write, or speak, from the margin – there is no escape from the pull between the near and the far, the essential and defining narrative of those who tell. I put it that the impact on politics of this relatively recent marginalist jockeying and the culture industry, some of the pundits of which have become its patrons, represents the failure of politics, of a true theoretical and political positionality. The failure of the new marginalism to accommodate the ever-present fantasy of rupture in their own intellectual Heimat is at the root of a malaise in recent cultural theorizing that seems little recognized in the currently fashionable post(s) of Theory and Politics. Writing in 1949 on the flagrant contradictions of the very cultural criticism (Kulturkritic) for which he himself was lauded, Adorno put it that the ‘cultural critic is not happy with civilization, to which alone he owes his discontent. He speaks as if he represents unadulterated nature or a higher historical stage. Yet,’ Adorno fiercely contends, ‘he is necessarily of the same essence as that to which he fancies himself superior .... But what makes the content of cultural criticism inappropriate is not so much lack of respect for that which is criticized as the dazzled and arrogant recognition which criticism surreptitiously confers on culture.’18 In such criticism, argues Adorno, inheres a ‘predominant social tendency, [in which] the integrity of the mind becomes a fiction. Of its freedom it develops only the negative moment, the heritage of the planless-monadological condition, irresponsibility.’19 And herein lies the problematic: the pathetic reasoning behind this diminishing positionality of theory and politics, of the need for the new marginalism (just one creed among the Kulturkritik) to ‘go down’ on

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the realwerk of theory and politics in order to find its own parasitical place in the sun.

Jean-Luc Godard has played martyr and matador throughout most of his career, casting himself ostentatiously in his own films, even when he’s not in them. His self-reflexivity is signal; true to his own dictum, he usually finds some way of putting himself in the picture and his Notre musique of 2004 is no exception. Setting both himself and an array of committed and/or transnational figures (of letters, politics, architecture) in the reconstitutive space of Bosnia, namely Sarajevo and Mostar, Godard plays out his own attendance at the European Literary Encounters conference. He casts his figures – including, and importantly, both Arab and Israeli – against the motifs of the rebuilding of the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina, shelled by Serbs in 1992, and the Old Bridge at Mostar, destroyed by Croatian tanks in 1993. Godard steps into the Balkan ring. A short sortie into the venal politics of identity ... Shot in three didactic tableaux – Hell–Purgatory–Heaven – Godard’s film ruminates for the most part somewhere about the middle, the mean where polemics (Brechtian more than Dantesque) take place among the ruins of a Sarajevo emerging from more than a decade of war. Godard deploys a characteristically attractive couple of young women to negotiate both the philosophy and the rebuilding; here, two young female Jews attend the conference, both pursuing different answers to their existential dilemmas as ‘victors living among the vanquished’. ‘Two faces, one truth’ is the refrain throughout this purgatorial mean and these women are indeed looking for the truth, and more than one at that. One, an aspiring journalist aptly named Judith Lerner (Sarah Adler), seeks her own homeland in a personal relation between the French Ambassador to Bosnia-Herzegovina and her grandfather at a reception for European Literary Encounters, an annual conference organized by the Centre Culturel André Malraux in Sarajevo. She brings a letter from her grandfather, ‘not for the Ambassador, for the man’. Either reluctant hero or collaborationist without due conviction, he appears to have harboured her grandfather and other Jews in Vichy France in 1943, a contender she feels for understanding and compassion. ‘Why Sarajevo?’ she prefaces the reason for her own compassionate mission. ‘Because of Palestine and because I live in Tel Aviv, I wanted to see a place where reconciliation was possible.’ She wants to interview not the French

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bureaucrat but the free man, to have a conversation; she wants to talk not of military or political issues but about psychology and ethics – as she has it: ‘Not a just conversation, just a conversation.’20 Lerner then extends the immediately personal, seeking out the Palestinian hero-poet Mahmoud Darwish whom she thinks might shed some light on her Existenz by way of an interview. (This is important, at least for Lerner, who confesses that she spends most of her time in New York.) Darwish, doubtless a minoritarian heavyweight, brandishing his pen and poetry in a manner that has made him legendary both in Palestine and the marginalist realm, lends Lerner his ear. Lerner to Darwish: ‘You have written that “He who imposes his history inherits the land of words.” Aren’t you underestimating the connection Israelis have to this land? You claim there is no room for a Homeric poet that you’re therefore trying to be a Trojan poet and also that you like defeated people.’ Darwish is backlit, smoking heavily in silhouette and yet to respond when an interlocutor abruptly cautions: ‘Careful! You’re starting to sound Jewish.’ This brings him to life: ‘I hope so,’ he says, ‘that’s a good thing. It’s well regarded these days. But the truth has two faces ....’ He speaks of poetry as some aetiological fraction of the dispossessed – those who have, those who don’t – the victors controlling the language (poetry) of the defeated by mere dint of their authority. ‘Poetry might be more profound in defeat.’ ‘I am the son of a people,’ he continues, ‘who have not been sufficiently recognised until now. I want to talk in the name of the absent.’ He argues his people ‘are only recognised because of the Jews. Do you know why we, Palestinians, are well known?’ he enquires of his interviewer. ‘Because you are our enemies. Interest in us is as a result of interest in the Jewish issue. You have caused us defeat but given us fame,’ he ruefully comments. Lerner: ‘We are your Ministry of Propaganda.’ As a Palestinian, he is a poet of the vanquished, he argues: ‘If they defeat us with poetry too, this will be the end. I carry the pliant language like a cloud,’ he continues as a beautiful native American (Mexican actress Leticia Gutiérrez) glides through the room, alluringly punctuating his burden as if by some portentous ellipsis (Pure Godard!). ‘A people without poetry is a defeated people,’ concludes Darwish. Godard places a number of native Americans throughout the first two tableaux of his film – from the elliptical ‘Hell’ sequence, as footage from American Westerns counterposed in the elaborate montage with other victims of war and pillage, to the trio who appear during ‘Purgatory’ bearing witness and delivering testimony on the crimes of war from Columbus to those of today – they appear as the conquistador’s reluctant

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Indians, the representatively vanquished. Their apparition reinforces a declaration made to a Muslim archivist in an early sequence in the Library: ‘Isn’t it about time ...’ begins the female, ironically silenced by her male companion. ‘Isn’t it about time, stranger,’ he overbearingly intones, ‘for us to meet face to face in the same age? Both of us strangers in the same land.’ His companion addresses the archivist, who appears less than interested: ‘Both of us are strangers to the same land,’ she seems to be berating the local. ‘Meeting at the tip of an abyss.’ Godard’s Indians in fact come courtesy of Darwish and these lines are taken from his poem ‘Speech of the Red Indian.’21 Darwish (and Godard here) pushes the identity politics envelope to the point of perversity, assuming ‘the voice of a Native American faced with the brutal reality of violent conquest, [he] yokes the Native Americans and Palestinians together, with the poem’s narrator urging a Columbus-type figure, “Then go back, stranger/Search for India once more!” ’22 Peter Handke similarly and infamously ‘yoked’ the Serbs and Native Americans, this time in defence of the Bosnian Serbs, and by means of a metaphorical inversion. Likening the geography of the siege of Sarajevo to that portrayed in the genre of the typical Hollywood Western, with the ‘bad Indians’ (‘die bösen Indianer’) clambering high over rocky crags above (‘oben auf den Felsklippen’), apparently laying siege and waste to the passive settlers’ wagons (‘die friedlichen Ami-Karawanen’) (Handke lays siege also to the Americans!), in the valley below. Handke here argues that, despite their apparent upper hand, it is the siege layers who are in fact the ‘freedom fighters’ (‘Freiheitskämpfer’), that the ‘driven men’ (‘die Zwangherren’) in the valley below, while gaining our sympathies as victims and thus fitting the narratalogical sway of a good Hollywood Western, are the real colonizers of the land of the Southern Slavs.23 It is precisely the perversity of this situation that is in Handke’s sights. Accusing Handke (himself half Slovenian) of some fetishistic interpassivity as he sidled up to the Serbian cause, the Slovene Slavoj Žižek, as if in defence of his own authenticity as a new European, averred: ‘No wonder, then, that he has turned to Serbia as the last vestige of authentic Europe, comparing Bosnian Serbs laying siege to Sarajevo with Native Americans laying siege to the camp of white colonizers ....’24 The other longer, reflective face in Our Music is Olga Brodsky (Nade Dieu), a French Jew of Russian descent whose character emerges slowly to Godard’s narrative through the purgatorial streets of Sarajevo. Late for Godard’s lecture, she runs through the streets of Sarajevo to hear her distant mentor reflect on the relation of text to image and other relations, filmic, cultural and political. ‘The image is joy,’ he announces.

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Of Home and Hearth

Writing Diaspora in the West

‘But beside it is a void. The image’s power can only be expressed through that.’ As he displays some stills of a classic shot-reverse shot from Hollywood (Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell from Hawks’ His Girl Friday), Godard deduces this device serves the fact that Hollywood can’t tell men from women ... ‘The truth has two faces ... Shot: reverse shot. Imaginary: certainty. Real: uncertainty. The very principle of cinema,’ says Godard, paraphrasing Merleau-Ponty, ‘to capture the light and shine it into the darkness. Our music.’ Godard’s views on montage and its codification in the seamlessness of the shot-reverse shot are well known and nowhere better expressed, in a most beautifully formal sense, in his Vivre sa Vie (1962) – here, he not only dispenses with the convention but sets to analyse and stylize it in a manner that parodies the apparent seamlessness of it all. From the first scene, where the protagonist Nana (Anna Karina) is introduced, we see her only elliptically and from behind, with most of the twoshot setup between her and boyfriend Paul shot over their shoulders in the mirror across a bar. The Hollywood code by another means. As Nana later meets her prospective pimp in another café a similar but more formal setup is played out. The scene is captured in a continuous left-right-left arcing dolly shot, sweeping continuously with the pimp framed from behind, repeatedly obscuring Nana’s face as he tells her about her new life as a prostitute. It’s a device contrived to distantiate, to construct the formal, visual means by which Nana’s control of her destiny is being stolen – both to put us in the picture and to show that, properly speaking, there is no such hope. Our identification fails. Cut forward about 20 years to Sarajevo, and Godard’s camera lingers on a pensive Olga as she sifts through some images of inter-titles from Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc. They appear as if only for her, unrelated to Godard’s disquisition (a reference, however, to his Nana from Vivre sa Vie, whom he also had watching Dreyer’s Jean d’Arc, portentously alone, and in tears ...); she now finds her calling as the titles seemingly address her directly – an epiphany: ‘AND DELIVERANCE? AND VICTORY? THAT WILL BE MY MARTYRDOM. TONIGHT I WILL BE IN HEAVEN.’ Godard continues, as if to give her victimology countenance. ‘In 1948, the Jews waded through water to reach the Holy Land. The Palestinians walked into the water to drown. “Shot and reverse shot,” he shuffles images from this time to demonstrate. Shot: reverse-shot. The Jews became the stuff of fiction. The Palestinians a documentary.’25 But Godard pulls an interesting card-trick here in this ‘documentation’ of the Palestinian peoples by means of a diverting but seemingly disingenuous parallel that works at inversion. He shows two images of

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Jews – one, he argues, is that of a half-crazed prisoner discovered in the camps titled ‘Juif ’ (though this is clearly a Nazi propaganda shot depicting the deranged ‘Juden’), the other a survivor from the final days of the death camps titled ‘Musulman’. Without discussing them, this apposition does, however, advert to the perverse irony that the lowliest Jews in the Lagers of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen ... all the camps, were called ‘die Muselmänner’ – the German for Muslims. Beyond help through malnutrition, other ravages and despair, these emaciated souls – be they gypsies, Jews, communists, homosexuals or other ‘moral criminals’ (those Lyotard would call ‘the jews’) – became derisively nominated Muselmänner, muslims, who were beyond help even by their own fellows. Where eminent survivors such as Primo Levi have eloquently aired this nominative perversity for what it was – another interpellation of extreme otherness, of subalternity, a nomination of ‘the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose disposition would have a general significance’ for what this strange phenomenon was26 – Godard, questioned on the subject, attributes this pejorative solely to the Germans, thereby aligning the Nazi and the Jew, leaving the real subaltern for his cause here, the pitiful Muselman, to those Levi called ‘the crematoria ravens’, the Sonderkommandos who tended the ovens and other funereal tasks.27 Levi chronicles the horrible lengths to which the fittest in the camps went to distance themselves from the Muselmänner, to ensure a complete lack of reflexivity, of identification. In an interview for Le Monde, Godard appears to do a little (selective) identifying of his own – it seems he’s cast himself as the ‘fourth Jew in the film’: ‘I’ve never succeeded in knowing what it really means to be Jewish. The only way for me to understand it is to tell myself that I’m the same: I want to be with others, and at the same time not with others. This is a feeling I have myself.’28 He describes his predicament and career well. Further, he is asked what he means by ‘the parallel he makes between Jews and Muslims in the film, based on the two photos of Nazi death-camp prisoners? Where did you get the photos you used for that?’ His answer is telling: The first photo is well known, it’s a picture of a prisoner with bulging eyeballs, which I believe was taken when the camps were liberated. The other photo, of a deported person, gives you the feeling that the end is near. They’re the ones who were so exhausted physically they were nearly dead, who were called ‘Muslims’ in the camps. I’ve always wondered how it happened that the Germans called Jews ‘Muslims.’ And then I realized that this was where the Middle East

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Little wonder it didn’t work out. The narcissistic story arc and sophistry would doubtless have been difficult for Ophuls to take. From a German word meaning Muslim to its hegemonic but common usage by the Jews against their own to a story presumably about Israelis boosting Muslims out of their Palestinian ‘apartment’. Woody Allen, maybe, but Godard needs new material.30 Spielberg made the way-too-subtle point of difference in his Schindler’s List as monied Jews were huddled into the Warsaw Ghetto and forced to share quarters with a large family of Orthodox Jews who seem less than fazed by the prospect as they chant in prayer. As the well-heeled husband attempts to calm his nearly hysterical wife, he comments: ‘It could be worse.’ She looks to these strangers, responding: ‘How could this possibly be worse!?’ Judith visits the Mostar bridge reconstruction and meets its supervising architect Gilles Pécqueux, who talks about the symbolic meaning of the rebuilding – again, ‘It’s not to restore the past, it’s to make the future possible ... Combine the pain and the guilt. Two faces, one truth ... the bridge.’ She reads some Levinas and, though perplexed about his ontological musings, remains optimistic. Godard can barely resist a beautiful woman reading a book, it’s a fantastic leitmotif throughout his work (Anna Karina in Bande à part, Alphaville, Pierrot le Fou, Brigitte Bardot in Contempt, Anna Wiazemsky in La Chinoise, Marina Vlady in Two or Three Things ...) Judith is dipping into Levinas’s Entre Nous: Essais sur le penser-à-l’autre, a collection of essays on the ethical moment of human dialogue as the mainstay of existence – apposite, despite her protestation: ‘This seems difficult to me.’ Taking photos of the Mostar reconstruction, Judith turns to reflectively gaze on Godard’s Indians who throw stones into the river and, with their belongings in a laundry bag, pile into a beat-up car like some local Bosniaks. As Judith quizzically looks on, they appear again, framed by the bridge and the river’s edge, themselves looking on silently, replete with horse and traditional costume, as if to represent some solemn symmetry between themselves and local Muslims, bearing witness. In another scene some Muslims answer the call to prayer at a mosque as the Indians sit on a street bench, echoing the call with spiritual incantations

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conflict started. You’re in an apartment, and someone arrives and says, ‘I have been appointed by God; I will now occupy this apartment.’ I wanted to make a movie about that with Marcel Ophuls, where we would show the two of them in that apartment. We talked, we tried to solve the question between ourselves, as if we had the power to do so, but it didn’t work out.29

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of their own. Strangers ‘meet face to face ... strangers in the same land’. The ethnic circle is closed. A girl with a red bag is walking toward the camera. ‘It’s like an image, but a distant one. They are two people, side by side. I’m next to her. I’ve never seen her before. I recognise myself.’ Olga comes into focus, her aesthetically framed beauty foregrounding the renascent Sarajevo. ‘The level of poverty is obvious. It is becoming more so. The landscape is strewn with wire, the sky red with explosions’; she is drawing a clear parallel between Sarajevo and the parlous state of affairs between Israel and Palestine. ‘As this ruin didn’t spare even the notion of culture, one must have the courage to dismiss it ... When the house is on fire, why save the furniture? The defeated are the lucky ones’; she is mournful over the desolation of the marginal life, the legacy of war. She is waxing Darwish, becoming Palestinian while Godard is becoming Jewish. Olga is resolute, telling her uncle – here, the translator at the conference for Godard’s literati – of her plans to martyr herself in the name of the vanquished. ‘Who’s speaking,’ he asks, incredulous. ‘The Jew or the French woman?’ Olga: ‘I’m not quite sure.’ But there is one thing of which she is certain: she carries the guilt of the victor like a cloud. ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem,’ she quotes Camus, ‘and that is suicide.’31 And she decides to solve the problem. Godard plays out the news of Olga’s martyrdom being broken as he (plausibly) tends his garden at home in Grenoble. Olga entered a cinema threatening a suicide bomb in Jerusalem. Giving the audience five minutes to leave – she was no terrorist, like her director, she was a humanist – she was shot dead by the Israeli special forces. No bomb was found in her red bag, just books. Olga’s martyrdom is uneventful. In ‘Paradis’, she wanders some wood by a river. A strangely Querelle-like US sailor sits with machine gun at his side fishing as he (anomalously) listens to the Marine’s Hymn (SFOR/NATO=US imperialism) and barely offers Olga a glance (it would indeed be predictable if Godard’s imperialists were cast as repressed homosexuals – ‘this is my weapon, this my gun’, etc.). Heaven is peopled with jugglers, someone reading David Goodis’s Street of No Return (Godard’s nod to Sam Fuller), some kids having some fun and another soldier with whom Olga, of course, shares an apple. Paradise is a damp squib. Questioned on the theme of suicide in his movies, Godard quotes Camus, having Olga speak it for him. It’s a philosophical image, he says, that has ‘stayed with me’. But he goes on to elaborate the ethical problem of writing a suicide bomber into his narrative – he rationalizes

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Of Home and Hearth

Writing Diaspora in the West

thus: ‘I thought, if I were to commit suicide, I wouldn’t want to throw myself out of the window – I’d be afraid of hurting myself; I don’t know how to buy a gun; I can’t ask my doctor to give me cyanide – he’d refuse; I can’t ask someone who loves me to suffocate me while I’m asleep. On the other hand I could, little by little, join some terrorists and commit a terrorist act. But I’d do it like Olga. I would achieve my suicide because I’d know the soldiers would shoot me three minutes later ... I am an image who has his friends, the books, in his pocket. And I said to myself, that I can do. I expected this to be criticised, but nobody has mentioned it. It’s unchallengeable.’ Godard says he wanted Judith to be the suicide bomber in her own land – the optimist drawn to the same conclusions – but Israeli actress Sarah Adler refused.32 Unchallengeable? Someone begged to differ. Godard’s bad faith here is palpable. All marginal quarters and ideological positions are apparently covered in this superficially poetic even bet. Positions are spoken, adopted and disavowed. A mean only of artifice, neither reason nor virtue. History is both rewritten and obfuscated by measures of both beauty and horror. The director uses his political foe as fodder (fair enough) and his avowed allies as mere ideological leverage. He’d said as much in his earlier piece of didacticism Le Gai Savoir (1968): ‘What is at stake here is one’s image of oneself.’ In all its poetic and aesthetic chicanery – it is, despite itself, a clever and sophisticated palette – we end up with a simple identitarian disposition. And he is not alone. Where were Bernard Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut when he needed their persuasive intonations the most? Poetic language is central here – the exilic lament becomes, by its history, legions of readers and by its cultural valency, elevated to the level of a metanarrative of its own. Poetry is the lingua franca of the exile and the marginal: ‘A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms’ as Nietzsche had it, stalk the exilic poet in a manner that makes the ordinary heimlich story-teller appear lonely, defenceless.

A road map for marginalism? In something of a eulogy to Edward Said, Bruce Robbins taps into an important factor in this bad faith polemic of places and subjects of diaspora. Referring to a novel, Dreaming of Palestine, by an Egyptian-Italian schoolgirl, Randa Ghazy, which created something of a scandal in Europe, Robbins expresses an interest if only for the sake of the issues of ‘authenticity’ it raised: ‘Ghazy not being Palestinian, not having lived in Palestine/Israel [ ... ] found out what was going on in the Intifada largely from television.’33 Robbins begins to articulate a wider issue of

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exilic imposture when he argues ‘this is the irritatingly persistent issue of the wannabe: wanting to be a Palestinian, wanting to join someone else’s revolution ...’ a situation invoking ‘the universal contempt on all sides for the one who is free to chose sides, but is not rooted in either, and thereby threatens to display the radical contingency of even the most rooted identity and commitment’.34 The nub of Robbins’s piece is that an enduring contradiction haunted Said’s own positioning in this regard. Said has argued that we must ‘map territories beyond those mapped by the literature of exile itself,’ that we should turn our attention from the likes of Joyce and Nabokov to the ‘uncountable masses for whom the UN agencies have been created, or refugees without urbanity, with only ration cards and agency numbers’.35 His call was to reflect on ‘the awful forlorn waste’ of exile, exhorting his readers to ‘leave the modest refuge provided by subjectivity and resort instead to the abstractions of mass politics’.36 Few would argue with the moral and political intent of this prescription – literary, filmic or dramatic abstractions of the marginal character pale in comparison with Said’s card-holding exiles and refugees, buffeted or mutilated by the political vicissitudes of competing nations and nationalisms. As he wrote, ‘[e]xile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience.’37 In the concrete Said argues across the sort of ‘here and there’ state of national identity, stressing the difference between the focused, public and all-inclusive ambitions of nationalism and the displaced sentiments of the exile. ‘Because exile, unlike nationalism, is fundamentally a discontinuous state of being,’ he argues, Exiles are cut off from their roots, their land, their past. They generally do not have armies or states, although they are often in search of them. Exiles feel, therefore, an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives, usually by choosing to see themselves as part of a triumphant ideology or a restored people ... The crucial thing is that a state of exile free from this triumphant ideology – designed to resemble an exile’s broken history into a new whole – is virtually unbearable, and virtually impossible in today’s world. Look at the fate of the Jews, the Palestinians and the Armenians.38 But it is precisely in this constitutive (or reconstitutive turn to) ideology that Said’s apparent dichotomy between the abstract and the concrete begins to collapse. This reconstitutive narrative of ideology is the concretization of a lost subject as pursued in a constitutive image – the return from the margins to a homeland – be it in the head of the liberal

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philosopher of existence or the marginalized subject. This narrative too is beholden to a certain nationalism in the constitutive image. I have here in mind the ‘concretization’ Roman Ingarden attributes to the process of apprehending or intuiting an aesthetic object, be it art, literature, drama, music, and so on. The process of concretization actually gives the intuition and the object its aesthetic form and, more to the point, its aesthetic impact or gravity. Ingarden distinguishes between the actual object of intuition and the process of intuition itself, rendering the art object as incontrovertible fact but the process of its rendering in consciousness somewhat less so. There is a fundamental difference between the object itself and its aesthetic, to the extent that a certain distance is allowed. Ingarden here is writing of the dramatic connection made in an aesthetic moment but is keen to qualify: ‘Undoubtedly, an echo of the shock experienced during the play is discernible for a while; but real life is much stronger, and demands its rights.’39 Just as in Said, something of this process can be seen in the ruminations of the new marginalists – their appeal to the exilic experience lies in a similar process of intuitive suspension. As Robbins and others well point out, Said borrows again from Auerbach’s famous exilic tract Mimesis on this very affectability, and has done throughout his oeuvre. For his reference in his Culture and Imperialism, he in fact bypasses Auerbach and goes straight to its source: I find myself returning again and again to a hauntingly beautiful passage by Hugo of St Victor, a twelfth-century monk from Saxony .... 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 on the world; the strong person has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.40 Of course, this reference to willed homelessness runs counter to his earlier exhortation to the realpolitik of the exilic masses, to ‘turn our attention from the likes of Joyce and Nabokov ...’ and may well point to a perverse and fantastic contradiction in Said himself. Robbins is polite: ‘... the political valence of this gesture is anything but clear. There is an obvious struggle between Said’s credo of intellectual detachment and the political struggle to retrieve a homeland.’41 Was exile a desirable condition, necessary to the most rigorous intellectual endeavor, or was it the result of a particular dispossession that

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And Robbins is on the money but, again, too polite when he attributes ‘this paradox or contradiction for which there is perhaps no purely intellectual resolution’ to ‘part of the secret of Said’s charismatic presence,’ in a sense rationalizing the paradox as ‘a zone of tension or contradiction [in which] Said was most productive’.43 Said both retains and rejects the exilic moment and this ‘zone of tension’ reflects an uneasy sublimation or sublation of marginal affectability in a compromise between poetics and politics. Robbins extends his apology for Said to the young writer Ghazy and in the doing appears to both countenance and articulate a certain exilic imposture, as he begins to describe the novel’s ‘political and aesthetic accomplishment’: ‘One might say that, with hesitation and reluctance, Ghazy makes a virtue out of an unpleasant historical necessity – in something of the same way that Said does with the discourse of homelessness and exile.’44 Robbins begins this essay by citing a personal conversation between him and Said about this very novel – ‘It’s a terrible novel, isn’t it?’ ventured Said. ‘I could not disagree,’ writes Robbins, ‘in general I had trouble disagreeing with him even when I wanted to.’45 He beat a hasty intellectual retreat; the best he could do was tell Said the novel was ‘interesting’ based on those questions of ‘authenticity’ it raised. So, with ‘hesitation and reluctance’, he bestows on Ghazy’s fiction precisely the cachet given Said. The truth has two faces. Indeed, the truth is two-faced ...

For my country’s good At the close of Emir Kusturica’s film Underground (1995), the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia literally comes apart. As a wedding scene unfolds and guests dance and drink maniacally to gypsy tunes, the bank of the Danube by which they celebrate breaks off into the small symbolic states the country will become. The hapless narrator sees only the green valley of a country that once was: ‘Here we built new houses with red roofs and chimneys where storks will nest. With wide open doors for dear guests,’ he observes. ‘We’ll thank the soil for feeding us and the sun for warming us. And the fields for reminding us

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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? I would argue that this question was never resolved in Said’s work.42

Writing Diaspora in the West

of the green grass of home.’ As the wedding party is cast adrift on the Danube he speaks a lament for his countrymen: ‘With pain, sorrow and joy we shall remember our country as we tell our children stories that start like fairy tales: “Once upon a time, there was a country ...” ’ In the context of the Balkan wars, Renata Salecl outlined the problematic of what she termed ‘the fantasy structure of the homeland’.46 The former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia is as good a homeland as any for discussing the subjectivity at play in such a fantasy structure – its breakup has been a protracted affair with worldwide attention and relative conflict and international intervention continuing since it began in 1991. It has spawned what has been termed by Maria Todorova a certain Balkanism, a perverse kind of Orientalism in which a nation has been forged out of a projected fetish and fantasy of the abject and the putrid – it has been subjectified by the reflexive moves of its observers such that the exotic fancies one may have encountered in any projection on the ‘orient’ have about them merely the abject fascination of a train wreck and the stink of a sewer. The region, through various geopolitical vagaries going back to World War I and its own recent wars of national separatism, has become, according to Todorova, ‘a synonym for a reversion to the tribal, the backward, the primitive, the barbarian ... That the Balkans have been described as the “other” of Europe does not need special proof.’47 Salecl argues that the nation is based on a kind of social fiction – essentially a narration about this homeland which, in Lacanian terms, she defines as fantasy: the attempt to symbolize or flesh out the emptiness or inadequateness of the reality. It is no coincidence that two of the most popular genres of cinema in Germany from post-World War I to the rise of the Nazis were the Heimatfilm and the Bergfilm: the former characterized by a kind of ‘down home and folksey’ plenitude and sentimentality (‘home-sweet-home’ film), the latter by a certain adventurous, horizonal sublimity – the Nazi pastoral. The breath-taking alpine extremes of the Bergfilm – rendered and realized in the extreme by the work of Arnold Fanck (and his rising star Leni Riefenstahl) – served to reinforce the wholeness and security of the Heimat: the fantasy of outland (the sublimity of the mountain extreme) gave flesh to the more possible fantasy of an ordered and familial homeland: Bergfilm is Heimatfilm.48 This fantasy of the homeland then functions as a scenario, a certain narrativisation of a societal situation that screens the essential and traumatic antagonisms and failures of society. In the fantasy structure of the homeland, argues Salecl, it is the nation that cannot be symbolised, so it is replaced with the rhetoric of home and hearth – the homeland

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emerges to serve as the intangible nation – national identification by another name. So in Salecl’s ‘fantasy structure of the homeland’ is indeed the projection of national identity, but of a nation that remains indefinable and essentially void. The point here for Salecl is that in the time of war, the fantasy holds where the nation (the national identification) fails. War picks at this fantastic structure of the enemy homeland, reshapes it and gives it another (apparently alien) form. Here, during the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the Serbs, she argues, threatened and ultimately ventured into a number of homelands, in one instance forcing ‘the Croats to redefine their national identity, to reinvent national myths and to start perceiving themselves in a new way, without linking their identity to the same territories, as they had done before.’49 Salecl’s argument is compelling but soon turns out to be profoundly contradictory. She does contend a paradox in this scenario: as the Serbs advanced on the Muslim enclaves in Bosnia-Herzegovina, she argues, they met not with this usual fantasy, structured around a national or racial homeland, but that of an abiding idealism founded in Yugoslav federalism – the Muslims, Salecl holds, ‘persisted in this transnational attitude even after their towns had been bombed; they did not want to call the attacker by his name ... give him a national connotation.’50 So, while the rest of the Balkans was being redefined by nationalist opportunities afforded them by the war – her own Slovenia being one of the first to secede from the Republic – the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina remained locked in a vision of Yugoslavia as a beacon of transnationality and held onto its socialist notion of brotherhood and unity. In Bosnia, Salecl contends, the Muslims had no such fantasy of homeland and so the Serbs forged their own myth of fundamentalism and religious extremism, attributed it to the Muslims, then set about destroying it. The upshot of this paradox, she argues, is that the savagery of the Serbian onslaught – the rape of Muslim women and girls, the razing of mosques, and so on – actually perpetrated a new fantasy structure of national identity for the Muslims, the very means necessary to mobilize soldiers in defence of a homeland they never actually had. They remained true to the cause until, she argues, the insults became too brutal and sustained; only then did they turn on them and call them ‘Chetniks and Serbian nationalists’.51 So it appears that what begins as a sort of psychic template for nations of all creeds evaporates in the face of the aggressor who, it seems, is not bound by such ‘homely’ or national blindness. The Serbs, for example, seem able to see with an acuity unequalled in their quarter and so cut through the theory (and, apparently, their own fantasy for a transnational

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idyll) and set about laying traps for their hick neighbours, taking their milk maidens and forcing their menfolk to retaliate by destroying their very bucolic existence. Why the Bosnians were not framed by this fantasy structure is not at all clear. Had they escaped the kind of logic of their neighbours, sublimating their apparent lack of ethnic identification to the higher realm of the Yugoslavian Federation ... or merely subjugated it to the name of the political Father? Why the Croats and Slovenians did indeed proceed to give their aggressor a national connotation is neither analysed nor articulated. Perhaps the coextensive secession of Slovenia and Croatia from the Federation in April 1991, the first out of the gate, brings with it a certain cultural proximity, whatever the competitive nature of their constitutional aims. The ‘otherness’ of BosniaHerzegovina remained suitably palpable, especially given Croatia’s own incursions in the region in support of its own new nationals. The extent to which the Catholic ‘West’ (viz. Germany, Italy, Poland, Hungary and some South American states, to name a few), in contravention of the UN Security Council-imposed arms embargo, assisted Croatia in affirming its sovereignty and opposition to Yugoslavia in September 1991, and subsequently saw fit to overlook the ‘excesses’ of its late President Franjo Tudjman, does not seem to fit within Salecl’s or, for that matter, many other critics’ frame. The shelling and destruction of the Old Mostar Bridge in Bosnia by Croatian tank forces as late as 1993 is almost lost to subsequent views on the matter. In what might well appear here as something of an unguarded moment, Salecl strangely muses on the idea of what it must be like for an aggressor to wander into a new enemy’s land and find no fantasy structure of a homeland to manipulate or destroy.52 Here may just be the insinuation of Bosniak otherness Salecl has been, in her own disposition, attempting to suppress. Like the Serbs, they perhaps symbolize the essence of the Balkanism, the traumatic remainder these new citizens of Europe are attempting to transect ... She observes certain cultural differences in the Muslim quarter of the Balkans, that the Bosniaks are patriarchal and that the very division between men and women structures their culture as one in which ‘a woman is essentially perceived as a man’s possession’.53 How a society so patriarchal in nature, against the tide of all its neighbours and the socialist ideals it avowedly held so dear, proceeded to treat its women as chattels is less than adequately addressed by the feminist Salecl. Yet precisely here it is the rape of Bosniaks by the Serbs that, for Salecl, gains special significance; since the Serbs cannot locate the Bosniak fantasy of the homeland, they’ll settle for the destruction of their sexual and religious identity instead.

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As Jusdanis might have it, this appears as just another form of border writing propagated by some putative counterhegemonic urge by poststructuralists to refute the nation, to paint it as a simple ‘invention, a fantasy, or a narration’.54 As he argues, the poststructuralist rejection of nationalism is based on their association of ‘nationalism with a Western, imperialist, logocentric reason’ which, at all costs, must be replaced by a new order of ‘anti-identitarian thinking’.55 And he’s on the money. Again, a contradiction is afoot – the overlapping of postcolonial and poststructuralist enterprise harbours an abiding identitarian logic of its own, an ideological kernel defying attempts at an overthrow. Her picture of a secular Muslim populace unencumbered by any particular Heimat fantasy of their own, apart from that projected on the failing Yugoslav Federation, would appear here as some strange Balkan pastoral. While the rest of the Federation began to crumble, Bosnia is presented as the only state somehow still beholden to a federated hearth and homeland within a grander republic. While Salecl cannot here be accused of any ‘ambivalence’ or ‘ambiguity’ with regard to her political and theoretical disposition, she falls precisely into the trap of failing to test her own reflective position. Her criticism of the dubiously blurred and distant Western perspectives on this conflict, of the West’s incapacity to ‘take sides, to name evil, to assign blame’, is baleful in its innocence. While Western self-serving pragmatism and collusion is a given (where is it not?), and colonial–imperial advancement and opportunism taken as read (where not?), the West here cannot be accused of ‘not taking sides, naming evil, or assigning blame’ – at this the West is legend and Salecl is parlously remiss in failing to point this out. In the West, the Western media – its politico-ideological representative force par excellence – have been demonstrably indefatigable in their denunciation of at least one corner of the Balkan ring: Serbia. The demonizing of the ‘socialist fundamentalists’ and ‘communist hard-liners’ of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and a counterpositional construction and reassertion of a certain ethnic victimology obtained in near to all reportage from (and subsequent theoretical reflection on) the region. Noted neoconservative Samuel Huntington – to be sure the bête noire of Salecl and her camp and in fact stating what many broadsheet journalists in the United States were reporting at the time – points out not only how the West did, indeed, takes sides during this war but even how they set about it: While considerations of civilizational realpolitik may have played some part in shaping American attitudes, other factors appear to have

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Writing Diaspora in the West

been more influential. Americans want to identify the forces of good and the forces of evil in any foreign conflict and align themselves with the former. The atrocities of the Serbs early in the war led them to be portrayed as the ‘bad guys’ killing innocents and engaging in genocide, while the Bosnians were able to promote an image of themselves as helpless victims. Throughout the war Americans paid little attention to Croat and Muslim ethnic cleansing and war crimes or the violations of UN safe areas and cease-fires by the Bosnian forces. For Americans, the Bosnians became, in Rebecca West’s phrase, their ‘pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacree and never the massacrer’.56 Salecl’s depictions and analyses of atrocities leave no doubt as to the gravity of war and the brutal, base measures taken in its path but her tableau appears as edited and selective as any media fare emergent from the conflict. Even at the outbreak of relative peace, the Balkans may well remain, for the West, a mire of ‘irreconcilable warring tribes’,57 but its role in all corners of the conflagration has been considerable, to a fault. In all their ineffective glory, a sad proliferation of peacekeeping acronyms has been clanking its way through the region for the best part of two decades and, for some, the question remains: whose homeland? This, however, does not detract from the power of the desire ... to be and to have ... but Salecl’s account sails all too close to the testimony uttered and recounted in all theatres of conflict; again, clearly, the sides taken in the geopolitical domain are like questions asked: they are contingent, what Vickery might call a Standard Total View (STV) – a perspective of incorporation (and inclusion) without compare.58 Vickery here seems close to Benjamin in his historiography when he argues that there ‘is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism,’ he contends, ‘taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.’59 ‘The tradition of the oppressed,’ argues Benjamin further, ‘teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.’60 And E.H. Carr similarly cautioned the student of history, advising him or her to put an ear to the interlocutor, before turning to the facts. ‘This is, after all, not very abstruse,’ argues Carr. ‘It is what is already done by the intelligent undergraduate who, when recommended to read a work by the great

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scholar Jones Of St Jude’s, goes round to a friend of St Jude’s to ask what sort of chap Jones is, and what bees he has in his bonnet. When you read a work of history always listen for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either you are tone deaf or your historian is a dull dog.’61 Yugoslavia’s ‘civil’ onslaught on Kosovo in 1998 and 1999 put the world in no doubt as to the stand of the West – NATO missile strikes on Yugoslav forces and the televised accompaniment of fleeing victims saw to that. The support of the EU for Kosovo’s independence and the arrest of former Bosnian Serb President Karadžic´ in 2008 has (just perhaps) pulled the curtain on the Balkan affair ... the threat is muted, familiar values impose themselves ... Polish filmmaker Władisław Pasikowski was describing this ideological tendency to a certain revisionism succinctly in his film Psy (The Pigs) in 1992. Set in post-Solidarity Poland – in his own distorted corner of the Second World – as members of the former Polish secret service are deployed into the ranks of the national police in the new apparently democratic state apparatus, the corruption and inherent failure of the State machine to deal ‘cleanly’ with the transition from one form of order to another is described by the film’s cynical protagonist, a hitherto (relatively) corrupt but loyal upholder of order in his Motherland, Franz Maurer: ‘When the Reds left and the Blacks [the Catholic Church, the new democratic Polish Republic] came on the scene they turned this brothel into a circus, with trained pooches running around the ring.’ It is not for nothing Konrád called the prevailing sentiment, apropos the fall of Socialism in the East, ‘the melancholy of rebirth’.62 The national here articulates the ideological well enough – nowhere is it said that nation states are incapable of being swayed by the unruly forces of reaction formation.

A compote of racism and ethnic slur in a marginalist jus Salecl’s former husband Žižek might call much of what I have just posited mere acting out of some ‘Leftist regret’ or ‘interpassivity’ over the pornography of a state in paroxysms of rape and slaughter: ‘Is not the Western liberal academic’s obsession with the suffering in Bosnia the outstanding recent example of interpassive suffering?’ he asks (in that idiosyncratically rhetorical manner), and he is indeed right to ask. But the interpassivity to which Žižek refers obtains in nearly all geopolitical, cultural, representative realms onto which one can reflect, project or merely watch – it is the very act of watching that matters here and the Balkans are not the only states of fascination, even for non-Balkan nationals.

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Writing Diaspora in the West

‘One can authentically suffer through reports on rapes and mass killings in Bosnia, while calmly pursuing one’s academic career ...’ he was writing more than a decade ago, clearly with some authority. But he goes further, arguing this is ‘multiculturalist racism at its worst ...’63 Žižek has, over the years, developed a veritable taxonomy of racisms, ethnic slurs and cultural slights. He was busying himself on these in 1992 while picking up on Balibar’s elaboration of P.-A. Taguieff’s differentialist racism – a sort of racism without races in which racism is postulated on the basis of an apparent insurmountability of cultural difference over simple nationalist or ethnic hatred – a move Balibar himself termed meta-racism or second-position racism.64 It is a racism that has, in the face of antiracism and the avowed tolerance of political correctness and affirmative action, in a sense, learned to be nice. While putting forward his own analysis of the European fascism as it was re-emerging in the early 1990s – neo-Nazi pogroms in Germany meeting with the approval of certain Social Democrats and serving as a rationale for reconsideration of immigration policy, and so on – Žižek approved of Balibar’s term but by interesting means. In setting his own scene of the machinations of racism and the dangers that lurk therein in a manner not dissimilar to Balibar, he does so before actually mentioning him. By the time Balibar is being applauded for his insight, Žižek has already made it, exhorting us ‘to be particularly attentive to ... the difference between this “postmodern” racism which now rages around Europe and the traditional form of racism’.65 This postmodern racism, he argues, is reflected racism, which has a tendency to put the racist in the shoes of the antiracist. So, the very differentialist racism articulated by Taguieff, and mediated or rendered by Balibar, is then displaced by Žižek! While, in the middle of the page, Balibar appeared in hospitable hands, by its end his articulate critique is effectively subsumed – ‘the distance of meta-racism to racism is void,’ writes Žižek with an authoritative flourish. ‘Metaracism is racism pure and simple, all the more dangerous for posing as its opposite and advocating racist measures as the very form of fighting racism.’66 By the end of that decade he’s done some more thinking on the subject, reflecting on it especially from his own homeland with its conflicts. This must be qualified: as a Slovene he has something of the split ontological status of being at once an erstwhile Yugoslavian and a Mitteleuropäer, the spectre of the former, especially its southeastern climes, still apparently tugging uncomfortably at his ego and its relatively new projected nation state. The Slovene is both centrist and marginalist, and his rhetoric increasingly exposes him to this each-way bet.

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But this context is critical to his analysis of the (self )-destructive ethnic passions that stalk him and the region today. The breakup of the former Federation has given him fertile ground for his distantiated analysis – no longer, at least nominally, part of the Balkans, he can begin to speak of their shifting terrain and redrawn borders as a new alterity, as a spectre haunting Europe. The shifting Balkan terrain has also further served his argument that Slovenia – at least relative to the rest of the region – is really not part of that Balkan spectre, that unruly region that promises little but primitive and vampiric ethnic urges and, at best, a lack of tolerance for its newly formed neighbours. It is, by this reckoning, Europe’s opposite – an enigma of displaced frontiers and newly formed margins, the Balkan negative term, as Hegel might have had it. His confused ontological status brings him to the enumeration of his racisms, which come to him, by and large, via the West (Old Europe) and the southeast (Balkans). His reflexive racism has already been touched on but elaborated here as a multicultural affliction whereby the old travesty of Balkan history as bloodstained and torturous is counterposed to the new reason of its newly established nation states, some of which have formally joined the ‘real Europe’. ‘Here racism is, as it were, elevated to the second power: it is attributed to the Other, while we occupy the convenient position of a neutral benevolent observer, righteously dismayed at the horrors going on “down there” ’.67 This is reverse racism, his real bugbear. Here the Balkan Other is celebrated as the authentically exotic heartland of the region – he means here, unequivocally, the Serbs, whose prodigious lust for life stands in complete contradistinction to the anaemia of Western Europe. This reverse racism, argues Žižek was pivotal to the success in the West of Kusturica’s film Underground which, at the height of the Balkan wars, celebrates all of the life blood of the above and takes a pro-Serbian stand in the depiction of the breakup of the Federation. Žižek hated it, the bourgeoisie in France virtually boycotted it and the Serbs didn’t much like it either (Žižek joins hands with Lévy and Finkielkraut). Kusturica’s success in the West gives Žižek another racial symptom, that of displaced racism, in which, generally, outsiders (Westerners) are given licence to apply racial slurs to their Balkan neighbours by dint of their geographical proximity and apparent likeness. Kusturica became the poster boy for Žižek’s reverse racism when, in an interview about Underground, he ‘dismissed the Slovenes as a nation of Austrian grooms’ and, while this is bad enough, ‘nobody even reacted to the open racism of this statement – it was OK’, says Žižek in a startlingly

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Writing Diaspora in the West

obvious example of his own reverse racism, ‘since an “authentic” exotic artist from the less developed part of ex-Yugoslavia was attacking the most developed part of it ...’68 He leaves one last form of racism out of his typology and it is one explained, only cryptically, after attacks on the United States on 11 September, perhaps a time when the Balkans were spared the reflexive turns of the West. (This, of course, has not mitigated his own diagnostic spleen about repressed American jouissance, that America got what it fantasized about in its own disaster movies, his quasi-intellectualized analyses of root causes, etc.). Anyway, his elided form of racism might well be called observational racism – close to reflexive racism, this racism is evident when the politically correct, multiculturalist observer of racism does nothing to correct it, on the basis that it is codified to such an extent that such a correction may actually bring it to light. Žižek tells of his witnessing of some nightmarish scene of everyday racist violence in Berlin in 1992. A German was blocking the way of a Vietnamese, harassment he observed from across the street – such distantiation is of course necessary to observational racism as proximity might provoke intervention. Each turn the latter took was blocked by the German in a way that, for Žižek, showed the Vietnamese there was no place for him in Berlin. As the German did not actually touch the Vietnamese, this was the codification of the racism, making it appear less than confrontational. But further, it allowed passers-by to ignore the act, or pretend it was not happening, or, like Žižek, just keep watching. While he watched this occur from across the street, he wondered at the difference between this harassment and the violence of a physical neo-Nazi attack. While he appears to have done nothing to intervene (not so much as an Entschuldigung sie, bitte?) in the German’s game – he was an observer – he wondered if this soft racism was not indeed worse than physical violence.69 Dušan Bjelic´, writing on a certain European scatological/psychoanalytical fascination with the Balkans from Freud through Kristeva, recounts a meeting in the early 1990s between Michael Ignatieff and a Serb soldier who had been fighting his Croatian neighbours for some two years. Ignatieff, sharing his quarters with the soldier, wants the goods on the real ethnic differences between these foes. The Serb is initially defensive, pointing out their outwardly subtle but inherently irreconcilable differences, even if they do look the same. Ignatieff presses the point, to which the frustrated Serb replies: ‘Look, here’s how it is. Those Croats, they think they’re better than us. They want to be gentlemen. They think they’re fancy Europeans. I’ll tell you something. We’re all just Balkan shit.’70

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Ignatieff raises the issue of the narcissism of minor differences as developed by Freud, concluding the Balkan conflict may be the acting out of just such a symptom. Freud conjectured on the anxiety inherent in the subject’s observation of sexual difference, essentially and perhaps simply of perceived otherness, and it was precisely here he found hostility among similars. The apparently simple opposition of sex was enough to incite a rift in the reflexive self. This ‘narcissism of minor differences’ he later extrapolated to cultures; arguing hostility inhered at the very juncture of intimacy, he cites Schopenhauer on the difficulty of porcupines seeking warmth among each other: ‘no one can tolerate a too intimate approach to his neighbour’, he concluded.71 Bjelic´ is less than sanguine about Ignatieff’s Freudian observation, perhaps feeling a certain leaning to a ‘Balkanism’ on the part of the foreigner. Bjelic´ cites one of his country’s own psychiatrists, Jovan Raškovic´ (well, a Serb from Croatia), who mobilized the metaphor prior to the war between the Serbs and the Croats – in Bjelic´’s words, ‘to legitimize ethnic conflict ... Oedipal Serbs and castrational Croats are, he argued, very much alike in that both have a strong antagonism to any authority – so much so that their “narcissism of small differences” would inevitably lead them to a “clash of characters” ’.72 Whether Raškovic´ used this fable to legitimize the conflict is arguable, but Bjelic´’s concern that such a position rationalizes or legitimizes ethnic hatred is palpable. He further cites the Bulgarian Julia Kristeva and her apparent ethnic revisionism, her resigned concurrence with Huntington’s clash of civilisations and the general tendency for Mitteleuropa to piss in the sink of the Balkans.73 Who can blame him? But, while he is no fan of Žižek, he does seem to be pointing to some narcissistic interpassivity akin to that posed by the Slovene and former countryman. Žižek, concurring with Todorova and Salecl, contends that the West has indeed adopted a Balkanism: ‘the Balkans as the timeless space on to which the West projects its phantasmic content’.74 Later he would argue this space was rendered, doubtless by the same mythos, an ‘imaginary cartography which projects on to the real landscape its own shadowy, often disavowed, ideological antagonisms ... Europe’s ghost’.75 Balkanism? Africanism? Southeast Asianism? All theatres of conflict and, arguably, all theatres for projection of abject fantasy – both from without and from within. The revised new syllabus, it seems, of Area Studies. This phantasmic content finds itself spilt out across all abject phenomena and, no doubt, war is as good a space as any for the analyst to observe such projection. Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now touches on virtually every geopolitical fetishistic raw nerve in what amounts to an

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overdetermined picaresque fantasy, transplanted from Conrad’s own anticolonialist tract Heart of Darkness (with fetishistic tendencies of its own) to Coppola’s arguably colonialist one. Famine and other natural disasters are also compelling viewing and it’s no coincidence that a globalized news and information industry has taken to these phenomena with alacrity. Strangely, Žižek further argues that, for this very reason, ‘one should avoid the trap of “trying to understand”; what one should do is precisely the opposite; with regard to the post-Yugoslav war,’ he contends, one should accomplish a kind of inverted phenomenological reduction and put in parenthesis the multitude of meanings, the wealth of the spectres of the past which allow us to ‘understand’ the situation. One should resist the temptation to ‘understand’, and accomplish a gesture analogous to turning off the sound of a TV: all of a sudden, the movements of the people on the screen, deprived of their vocal support, look like meaningless ridiculous gesticulations. It is only such a suspension of ‘comprehension’ that renders possible the analysis of what is at stake – economically, political, ideologically – in the post-Yugoslav crisis: of the political calculuses and strategic decisions that led to the war.76 Here it seems that Žižek’s dubious bracketing serves only a kind of rerendering of the ‘multitude of meanings’ as mere surface, just another surface to which he is objecting. Žižek’s proposed analogy of turning off the sound of a screaming television with some phenomenological reduction seems just another instalment in banal postmodern aesthetics. So much for adumbrational viewing. The global, 24-hour televisation of bloody conflict via CNN, FOX, NBC, and so on, to name but three in the cosmopolitic (cable/satellite) of television – sound, or no – can do little other than offer the ‘meaningless ridiculous gesticulations’ of a peculiarly ahistorical representation. The ‘suspension of “comprehension” ’ to which Žižek refers amounts to little more than an appeal to fall back on the ‘let’s not talk about that’ kind of disposition of many of modern history’s survivors, a position of little assistance in any understanding ‘of the political calculuses and strategic decisions that led to the war’. Chris Marker put phenomenology more properly to work in the analysis of struggle, teasing out of the shadows the meaning of what appears to consciousness ... In his film Sunless from 1982, Marker puts history’s writing and viewing of meaning in the image – he evokes the work of

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friend and artist Hayao Yamaneko, who has digitally ‘synthesised’ news footage of the struggle between protestors and police over the Narita Airport struggle during the 1960s, rendering the clash in highly colourized abstractions: ‘If the images of the present don’t change, then change the images of the past. He showed me the clashes of the ’60s treated with his synthesiser. Pictures that are less deceptive, he says ... than those you see on television. They proclaim themselves to be what they are: images. Not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality. Hayao calls his machine’s world the Zone, in homage to Tarkovsky’ and the unreal and lawless world portrayed in his film Stalker. When Žižek’s own political position is less interested – bracketed perhaps by attention to less apocalyptic or more distanced, even banal cultural phenomena in his wider opus – his prescription for a reversed phenomenology is itself reversed: if we look, we find narrative structure, fictional constructions, repressed yearnings, and so on. This almost baleful contradiction, in Žižek, may well be born of the more quotidian example of a parallel country, a parallel subjectivity rather than a parallel universe ...

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3 The Interstices of the Real

Andrzej Munk’s famous film from 1960, Bad Luck, was reprised by Andrzej Kotkowski as Citizen Piszczyk in 1988 as a sort of post-Solidarity sequel, a rewrite and revision in which the real Piszczyk (Jerzy Stuhr), as characterized by Munk, reflects on his misrepresentation in the original. There is a scene in Bad Luck in which something of de Certeau’s silent majority and the postmodern portent about the grand narrative come together. After being mistaken for a political graffitist and impressing his warden with his word craft, Piszczyk is confined in ‘privileged quarters’ – with another prisoner, a Professor of Philosophy – in order to write re-education propaganda. As the Professor muses on the nature of Party aims, he confides in Piszczyk, concluding that they are entering a completely new period in Socialism, ‘the period of the national monolith’. In a moment of apparent lucidity, he suggests to his hapless fellow that this State monolith will lead to all sorts of strife as the nation accepts one ideology, one creed. ‘All the present divisions will disappear,’ he advises. ‘Progressive and regressive forces, Party members and nonParty members, believers and non-believers’ will collapse into artifice. Piszczyk is incredulous – not sure if this is dangerous talk because it will land them in trouble or for its political and philosophical augury. The Professor attempts to mollify Piszczyk, advising that he’s merely being logical, that under such a new representative sway the Party will simply be swept along, sublated as the nation follows one, monolithic ideology. Under such conditions, he concludes, ‘we can say that the Party will soon become superfluous.’ In the relation between what could be termed the representative map and the ideological territory we might glimpse something of a critique of appearance – of the representational imaginary of metaphysics 60

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The Subject Missing: Erasure and the Reflexive Margin

and the role of the subject in the system of representations. But in this very relation – the flattening of the real – might also reside both the marginalist and their quarry, though here any trace of subjectivity is difficult to grasp as the subject itself is effaced in both the surface fictions of postmodern fancy and the putative theoretical metanarratives that might just have the capacity to extricate them, or at least to throw them a rope. The Professor’s prognostications on the Party augur none too well for the parlous state of representation and its subject, as much under the new regime of the postmodern as for the banality of the totalitarian state. Now here’s a stratagem: in the regressive postmodern formula there is no more metaphysics – no more narrative or teleology – because there is apparently no more subject. This is, of course, the general thrust of postmodern nihilism in which ‘... all that remains, is the fascination for desert like and indifferent forms, for the very operation of the system that annihilates us.’1 But in this annulment resides the paradox of the remainder: while the subject is rubbed out – albeit an erasure perpetrated by a system – there is always some subjective leftover, someone left to watch, to be fascinated, to be further annulled, and so on – a sort of philosophical incarnation of the sparse narratives of Alain RobbeGrillet, ‘a thoroughgoing and convincing embodiment of an elimination of signs ... based on the disappearance of the subject’.2 It is here that the stratagem of narrative serves a pivotal role, both in the complexity of ideology and subjectivity and, moreover, in the machinations of the new marginalists’ enterprise – notably postmodernism. In their rush to dispense with theoretical metanarratives as oppressive constructions, they have succeeded merely in replacing them with gaudy shop fronts. So we have here a process by which a subject is negated and a mirrored façade erected in its place to mitigate any heuristic apprehension. The postmodern shop front intends no relation between signifying expressions and the phenomena to which they might refer in an outside world. This subjective reduction is, of course, a profoundly contradictory proposition, as the anti-identitarian and counterhegemonic projects – the subjective proponents of which still go window-shopping for their various causes – fly in the face of putatively antihumanist metanarratives, mistrusted and abandoned for apparently riding roughshod over the human subject and spirit. But, in Hegelian terms, negation has a way of positing that which it excludes. In their rabid resistance to what the postmodernist sees as the authoritative and objective intonations of dead white males their rhetoric is indeed highly subjective, as all strictures of the metanarrative

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are cast aside in the name of some subjectivity that, for reasons neither proffered nor known, is just as rationalist a prospect as that of the objectivities pushed forth apparently by their master storytellers. That said, it is this very conflationary mode of representation and apprehension (subjective intuition) they eschew that allows for the parasitic relation between the marginalist and the marginal, a relation in which at least one subject will not survive. While they man the barricades in the name of cultural, sexual, ethnic and all manner of subjective human difference, they set about consuming that very subjectivity and difference in a guilty subjective pleasure of their own. ‘The radical intellectual in the West is either caught in a deliberate choice of subalternity, granting to the oppressed either that very expressive subjectivity which s/he criticizes or, instead,’ writes Spivak, ‘a total unrepresentability. The logical negation of this position,’ she rightly avers, ‘is produced by the discourse of post-modernism, where the mass is only the mass because its social energy has already frozen ... This negation leads to an emptying of the subject-position’3 – here, that of both the intellectual and the subaltern. There’s no doubting, on close inspection, that the relation between the modern and the postmodern evinces a conflictual, if not entirely contradictory, spatiotemporal positing – between the old and the new – of the subject and its place in the contested ground of representation. Douglas Kellner is suitably equivocal about the debate over the construction of identity, uncertain as to whether or not we have passed from high modernism into the new epoch of the postmodern. He argues, in a manner that is testament to the inherent superficiality of the enterprise, that the postmodern debate is one essentially over which terminology should be used. But, caught in this juncture is the very identity of the subject. ‘Likewise,’ he contends, ‘it is an open question as to whether one wants to keep using the category of the subject in cultural theory and elsewhere.’4 His question has a ready answer, as he points to the notion of the subject as a social construct and an illusory one at that and, further, that media culture is not that interested in the notion of a constitutive subject, but rather in the means by which various subjective identities and subject positions can construct themselves. Instead of interpellation (more of which later), the culture industry invites subjects to, in a sense, self-interpellate and identify as media constructs, be they stars or other figures in the cultural landscape. Kellner does question the postmodern claim to subjective erasure, arguing that it is, at least, exaggerated. He holds up media culture as the new supermarket, from which identities,

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proper role models, proper gender behaviour, may be simply chosen from the identity shelf in the fifth aisle. ‘Once upon a time, it was who you were, what you did ... But today,’ he argues affirmatively, ‘it is how you look, your image, your style, and how you appear that constitutes identity.’5 The subject here is not subjected but, in some apparent and mediated hyperdemocracy, subjects ... itself. Clearly, it is in the interests of some that the question of the subject indeed remains open ... Adorno asks if this ‘urge for an unspoiled basic stratum’, this urge ‘for a fresh start in metaphysics, or as they call it, for radical questioning’ is not, in any case, complicit in the very culture it seeks to overcome, making ‘that supposed demolition even more of a conspiracy with the culture one boasts of razing’. Adorno argues that this radical questioning – this ‘wish to scrape off the delusions which a culture that had failed was papering over its guilt and over truth’ – falls victim to its own delusional metaphysics, a methodology that fails to apprehend its own bounds. ‘The only possible escape route,’ he argues, ‘would be to define ... culture as the lid on the trash; and nature, even where it takes itself for the bedrock of Being, as the projection of the wretched cultural wish that in all change things must stay the same.’6 Theoretical masters and slaves alike get caught up in their own contradictions, their readings overdetermined, lost to reflections of a merely fashionable surface. Horst Ruthrof is rightly harsh on the fetishized surface phenomena of the postmodern, arguing that in the latter the very relation of syntax to semantics is lost in the overly syntactic rendering of surface phenomena. Whereas in the postmodern such surface phenomena are described in ‘often celebratory and emancipatory terms’, Ruthrof sees reflected merely a ‘control base’ for a wholly divergent semantics, that of ‘the power structures of international capital’.7 Postmodernism has gone radical only to the extent that it has come to be defined by its own hyperbolic metaphors, to believe its own press – there is nothing outside its text. Postmodern style is merely a ‘surface semantics in free play,’ Ruthrof further points out, rendering it both ‘aesthetically attractive and politically insidious’ – a fascination with artifice that elides important ‘questions about the likely conditions for making those surface phenomena possible, and the cui bono question of what or who profits from them and in whose interest it is to multiply their appearances’.8

A cloud of representations It is precisely these questions about the likely conditions for making those surface phenomena possible that are in need of charting – the

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question of what or who profits from them naturally follows. And for that, I want to begin by turning to the question of ideology and in the manner of this signature passage from the notorious antihumanist, Althusser: ‘In ideology men do indeed express, not the relation between them and their conditions of existence, but the way they live the relation between them and their conditions of existence: this presupposes both a real relation and an “imaginary”, “lived” relation. Ideology, then,’ he continues, ‘is the expression of the relation between men and their “world”, that is, the (overdetermined) unity of the real relation and the imaginary relation between them and their real conditions of existence.’9 While the British culturalists would have little problem with the word ‘lived’, being itself the centre of the experience they championed, places for the imaginary and the ideological proved more difficult for them to locate. The idea that a man’s world be parenthesized, in a sense put out of reach by a relation that is at once real and imaginary, and overdetermined at that, makes the very notion of agency a difficult construct. This is the flea in their ear – they were right to suspect something of the diminution of agency within this construct, but whether they were right about his subjective apparatus, about the way it might act and play with the minds of acting/working/thinking individuals, is another story altogether. It is for this reason I have mobilized the Frenchman here. While it is true that in Althusser’s desire to extract a scientific reading of Marx the rational subject took something of a beating, there was method to this apparent philosophical madness. As, it was argued, the sensuous tactility of the labourer represented by the value of the commodity was subsumed by the commodity itself, there was a logical proposition that to analyse such a commodity from the labourer’s perspective was likely an empty exercise. As to the very structure that defined it ... well, that was another story. In capital, labour was represented in the commodity as its value, but this was coded, hieroglyphic, and its true representation did not appear as such in the commodity itself. The actual, structural and aetiological measure of its existence – both value and the subject who created it – was absent in the commodity representation. From here Althusser poses the question of the relation of capital to its object – that is, the discursive workings of the text to its object, its real. Short of ordaining the subject with some new scientific vision of their own labour, which, as Marx had already said, had disappeared into the tailor’s coat, Althusser’s scientific wager was to remove the analysis of the commodity from the subject position of the labourer such that the subject’s own misprision would not militate against a truly discursive reading.

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Now clearly this ‘science’ was anathema to the humanists – the idea that only a heady school of Marxist intellectuals was privy to such a decoding and that therefore the workers were merely the lumpen bearers of certain structures of capital that served to oppress them was, indeed, the impoverishment of philosophy, not the workers themselves. And these relations, of course, include language and communication, but the structuralists offer little joy here. Writing of certain narratological constructs in Sollers’s subjectively sparse prose, Barthes was arguing by 1979: ‘In the structural (linguistic) sense of the word, the subject is not a person but a function. There is nothing to oblige us to give this function a central (narcissistic) function .... Structuralism,’ he adds, ‘has already somewhat emptied the subject. The task still remains of depriving it of its situation.’10 As we can see, the subject, let alone its imputed agency or experience, can indeed be difficult to find. Althusser’s reading of capital was to mobilize a discursive enterprise in capital, putting to it a Freudian ear to listen to the speaker’s utterances and, just as importantly, for the silences, the symptom: ‘Only since Freud have we begun to suspect what listening, and hence what speaking (and keeping silent), means,’ revealing ‘beneath the innocence of speech and hearing the culpable depth of a second, quite different, discourse, the discourse of the unconscious’. He attributes to Marx the discursive work of reading, maintaining ‘that only since Marx have we had to begin to suspect what, in theory at least, reading and hence writing means’.11 But, while Althusser may well be accused of manhandling the subject in the very act of positing him, he elaborated the difficulties that obtain in relieving the subject of its reflexive burden, as much as the repressions of the State, when he expressed the lived relation between men and their world ... For him this lived relation ‘only appears “conscious” on condition that it is “unconscious” ’; parlaying Lacan and Freud into a larger Marxist wager, he sees something of a cloud of representations in these relations that in any case comes to act functionally and structurally on subjects in a manner that escapes them. Within this schema inheres a system of representations, most of which has little to do with consciousness, but which acts in a manner that gives consciousness the hue of the axiom. The lived relation then is ‘simple on condition that it is complex, that it is not a simple relation but a relation between relations, a second degree relation’.12 One relation – a one-to-one relation – is difficult enough but the negotiation necessary to accommodate the multifaceted potential of such a second-degree relation shows that any subjective perspective might be skewed, to say the least. And this is

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what the counterhegemonic – particularly in its anti-identitarian garb – is up against. The cloud of representations makes for difficult flying. Althusser spoke of the constitutive nature of the subject in and through ideology in a manner that, it is true, brings complexity (indeed, some might say, an impossibility) to the notion of sensuous human praxis and to Althusser’s very relation to subjectivity itself. As he has it, the subject constitutes ideology but only to the extent ideology is the constituting force of subjectivity. By this tortuous interplay, the subject exists already but comes into play only when ideology gives it meaning, allows that subject to think and to act and, at that, through processes that can only occur ritualistically – that is, they are subjected to the various ideological modalities of the state such as going to church to pray, engaging in certain social discourses that are formal. This is not to say the lived relation precludes political action, or inaction, but that these actions too are lived ideologically. The very notion of a subject then is, for Althusser, a bourgeois construct and one that is itself in need of unpicking. It is no coincidence that Marcel Ophüls’s 1969 film The Sorrow and the Pity stirred considerable debate over the real versus the imagined relation of the French to the Germans during the Occupation of World War II. The arguments raised by Ophüls – dispelling the myth of a mass Resistance, confirming the fact of a comfortable collaboration and collusion, and so on – had been raging in France, especially on the Left, since the War, but this film exposed the raw nerve of this very lived relation elaborated by Althusser, and just by letting its subjects speak. The leitmotif here is the subject as defined as a legal term, and so ideology is effected by certain formal, administrative processes (Ideological State Apparatuses) that act on individuals, transforming them into subjects by an interjection, a narrative placement by means of a certain ‘interpellation or hailing and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: “Hey, you there!” ’ – a nomination which effects by its very utterance a subject, who is forced by his turning to recognize himself as subject. ‘One individual (nine times out of ten it is the right one) turns around, believing/ suspecting/knowing that it is for him ... By this mere one-hundred-andeighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject.’13 It is worth noting that by subjecting the subject by the not insignificant hailing by the law, there is a subtle imputation that his actions are potentially unlawful, reducing his position to that of a citizen outside the Law, and therefore his sovereignty, his privileged place in philosophy ... Acknowledging his debt to Gramsci here, Althusser’s little ‘theoretical theatre’ illuminates the penumbra of hegemony whereby the statistical

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certainty with which the hailing is purported to be nine-tenths accurate – the subject in a sense fingers himself – gives the repressive nature of the social state a more complex reality, and herein lies a serious problem in theorizing the subject with agency. Althusser puts both a cop on the corner and a priest in the middle of the street here as he implicates the Church in the Law that stops the subject in its tracks. The Catholic Church and the Christian and Hebrew Gods are invoked here to show the power of religious ideology in everyday life, to show that subjects in their consciences are already somewhat willing supplicants. In his discussion of the processes of repression Althusser distinguishes between Repressive and Ideological State Apparatuses, arguing ‘... no class can hold State power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the State Ideological Apparatuses’.14 Repressive power alone won’t do – the ideological apparatuses, ever beholden to the State (here too is included the church), must be mobilized in and through the Ideological State Apparatuses by a sort of secondary, subjective repression: here is the looming hegemony of the factotum. It is as commonplace today to engage with Althusser’s theorizing as it was last century and, as Alain Badiou (former student of Althusser and subsequent Maoist) points out, ‘with an international zeal which ... is yet to falter’. But, he argues, ‘there is no theory of the subject in Althusser, nor could there ever be one. For Althusser,’ he avers, ‘all theory proceeds by way of concepts. But “subject” is not a concept ... There is no subject because there are only processes.’15 While this is a convenient and superficial reading by Badiou, of both Althusser and his subject here, Hegel, Althusser too is guilty on the same counts. Writing on Hegel’s relation to Marx, Althusser argues that certain critical ‘instruments of theoretical production’ articulated by Hegel – viz. the dialectical movement, of teleology and negation, the negation of negation – allowed a new philosophical practice, a critical inversion of idealism into materialism, which revealed the real machinations behind the subject and its positioning in ideology. Althusser suitably invokes the psychoanalytical terms of displacement (the point and effect of the dialectic) and the unconscious to lead us to his major premise: that Marx owes Hegel ‘the concept of a process without a subject’.16 Pointing to the dialectical process in Hegel’s theory, Althusser here argues: ‘The process of alienation without a subject (or the dialectic) is the only subject recognized by Hegel. There is no subject to the process: it is the process itself which is a subject in so far as it does not have a subject.’ The subject, to the extent it does exist, must be sought in the teleological nature of the dialectic – a difficult job since the beginning

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of this process is denied as soon as it is affirmed, the very negation at the root of this process of alienation that denies its subject by denying its very origin. He subsequently asks: ‘What are the conditions of the process of history?’ Here, he concludes, ‘Marx no longer owes anything to Hegel: on the decisive point he contributes something without precedent, i.e.: There is no such thing as a process except in relations (sous des rapports): the relations of production (to which Capital is restricted) and other (political, ideological) relations.’17 In the manner of his own avowed reading, Althusser’s invocation of Freud is symptomatic here: his reading of Hegel (in this particular instance) serves as a displacement and a disavowal that allows him to reach two (self-important) positions: (1) as the subject is a function and product of the bourgeois State, it is robbed of its real political agency – by effacing the subject in Hegel, he was able to do the same in Marx and thus rid the revolutionary project of its bourgeois constraints; and (2) that Marx was able to materialize Hegel’s main philosophical offering (the dialectic), deliver it from its bourgeois shackles and put it in the service of a real revolutionary process (and so owes the political father nought). It is noteworthy that Althusser draws the young Derrida into his game, attributing to the latter the introduction of this teleological premise of negation – the origin affirmed/denied (Hegel’s circle of becoming that presupposes its end and its beginning) – into philosophical reflection via his notion of erasure (rature).18 (Althusser sublates Heidegger!) While Marx might no longer owe Hegel, this point on the process without a subject is, on the basis of his reading of Hegel, a ploy of disavowal. As Althusser here wraps the teleological terms of the dialectic in Hegel’s Concept (and the transcendental it suggests), he deliberately ignores the role of the reflexive self in Hegel as he delivers up the philosopher denuded of any subjectivity. Only 20 years earlier he studied and wrote lucidly of Hegel, defending a thesis before Bachelard, for which he received the highest honours and in subsequent years continued a critical engagement with Hegel that was coextensive with that of Marx.19 Althusser knows only too well that an empirical subject inheres in the dialectical movement or sublation (Aufhebung) and the Concept (which contains all the dialectical terms), albeit one that is not simply given; that the subject posits itself in and through the dialectical process, the self (Selbst) and importantly self-reflection (Selbstreflexion) and self-consciousness (Selbstbewusstsein) are both one and mediated: a ‘unity wrested from division through the reciprocal conversion of opposing terms’.20

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As Althusser reads it, Hegel’s Concept is replete with flesh and brotherhood, independent life, human being, Ego, self-becoming and, importantly, actual subject, and so on, all of which are at once riven and whole. It pays a price in that it takes a beating getting there and, at that, is never quite sure it makes it and then is always stalked by its other, negative term. Descartes doesn’t live here anymore! Here is ‘the ambiguity of intuition which turns man’s gaze against him: the truth is literally blinding, like the sun when we look at it with open eyes’.21 And so too, it must be said, there is indeed a theory of the subject in Althusser, and it is one in which Hegel still resounds. As Adorno points out, ‘dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder ...’22 Here, Hegel remains in Althusser. Badiou contends that subject is not a concept, that in Althusser there is no subject because there are only processes – this is in neither the Hegelian nor the Althusserian case, though it might well represent some displacement or disavowal (some critical faux pas) in Badiou himself.23 The Concept is subject and subject is Concept (selbstisch) – they are one in the teleological premise. Further, for Hegel, the subject is none other than process – the process of its own becoming. As for Althusser, it seems, again, this might just have been caught up in the same displacement or disavowal that kept his unruly Catholicism in check throughout his career.

Circling the margins of becoming This theory of the subject is one that may be mobilized in the analysis of both the marginalist and the machinery at play in the relation between the marginalist and their own subject. Adorno is affirmative: ‘The fundament and result of Hegel’s substantive philosophizing was the primacy of the subject, or ... the identity of identity and non-identity’.24 In this construction we find the kernel of the reflexive subject and the principle of speculation as proposed by Hegel and the difficulties inherent in the negotiation of that subject and his theory; but it is here also that we may witness the contradictions that serve to gloss the relation of that subject to others and its world. While I include all in this realm, none have taken up such a long and secure lease as the marginalist. Hegel sets it up: ‘Self-consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness ... A self-consciousness has before it a selfconsciousness. Only so and only then is it self-consciousness in actual fact,’ he writes, ‘for here first of all it comes to have the unity of itself in its otherness.’25

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The incipient self-consciousness has before it another – it has come outside to take a look around. For Hegel this move is critical to selfidentity’s becoming. It has a double meaning in that it has recognized itself in its other (object) and stepped in its shoes, but in so doing it has lost the self from which its has emerged and so has sublated, overcome its other and at once become it (the Aufhebung, as it both negates and preserves – becoming’s double meaning). In this first movement there is an immediate satisfaction and certainty of identity’s own self (Desire), but what has occurred up to this point is merely a production – identity has become an object in which there still inheres this stubborn and destabilizing negative term (other, non-identity). While identity recognizes itself in its new other, it doesn’t trust it for a second. ‘How could this be real? I must overcome this,’ and so it too is cancelled, sublated in another movement – the first double meaning is sublated and so at once emerges as another double meaning – the negation of the negation. Identity sees itself as another independent being, the intentions or reality of which it cannot be sure, but this other is itself and that just won’t do. It must sublate this other being in order to be certain of its own self and again, in so doing, gets itself back and becomes at one with truth. And that’s just the beginning. Percy touches on Hegel’s system by means of his own expression zone crossing, referring to an action by which the alienated man is by one means or another – here his train has simply stopped before his station – taken outside his quotidian experience and momentarily transported to a parallel one. The figure, if for a moment only, steps outside his phenomenal realm into another and comes, by this most simplistic of actions, to experience his own self experiencing: ‘A zone crossing has taken place ... For he, the commuter, has done the impossible: he has stepped through the mirror into the en soi’ and lived to tell.26 Reflecting here his Sartrean existential (Kantian–Hegelian) influence, Percy is speaking of the in-itself of the other, things that exist out there, objectively, in the world (Hegel’s object, non-identity) – the ‘It’ in which the subject is reflected yet which usually eludes him and his own reflexive ‘I’ (identity). Here, the commuter has stepped out of his situation, taken a look around, poked about and no doubt stepped right back into his old quotidian space unaware of any crossing having taken place. For Percy, however, a rotation has occurred through this zone crossing, and this is not a bad thing. It points to the potential, if nothing else, of the capacity to undertake such a journey, perhaps to freedom without having to commit to the experience. This is, after all, the existential longing – the actual, real existing subject is to be retrieved from these relations.

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The dialectical process is the self-production of subjectivity, a subjectivity that traverses the zone between subject and its object and from which will, just maybe, emerge Hegel’s Absolute, knowing subject. This intersubjective positioning – and an appropriately diffident zone crossing – are shown to great effect in Richard Attenborough’s film Shadowlands (1994). The film’s protagonist, C.S. Lewis (Anthony Hopkins), steeped in his own spiritualized enclosure of self, has been repressing his amorous feelings for American poet Joy Gresham (Debra Winger). He notices her in a crowd to which he has just delivered a lecture and approaches, cautiously reaching for emotion, saying: ‘I was thinking of you ... and ... there you were!’ Gresham replies: ‘No, here I am! Present tense! Present ... and tense.’ The rotation rarely goes as smoothly as that of Percy’s curious commuter. What has happened back in the Hegelian camp is just such a reflexive rotation but, again, perhaps one that is not so kind – the self has seen itself in the other, become the other and, now certain of its own self, stepped back into itself again. But there’ll be more, and these more tortuous than the first. Hegel’s fellow lets the other self-consciousness remain opposite. Now, he points out that this process appears onesided, as though it is the movement of one self-consciousness alone, but he is quick to argue that each self-consciousness is whole and necessarily equal to the other and that the process – the movement is absolutely the double process of both self-consciousnesses (the double entente), they act on each other equally and despite their distinction (identity and nonidentity, differentiatedness and non-differentiatedness). The reflexive action takes place as the play of forces across a middle term which is selfconsciousness itself.27 But where once this rotation might have occurred as in the mimetic play of naïve children, self-consciousness has learnt from its sojourns and grown both wise and greedy. Self-consciousness is selfish, identity at the exclusion of all others, it is Ego (Ich bin Ich)! Selfconsciousness always exists for another self-consciousness and it is itself desire, ‘it is only by being acknowledged or “recognized” ’.28 When the young Colegero becomes enthralled by the character of a local mobster Sonny lo Specchio (Chazz Palminteri) in Robert De Niro’s 1993 film A Bronx Tale, we see this subjective placement by recognition. The story says as much about Machiavelli as it does about Hegel (his name, lo Specchio, the mirror, is a good enough clue) – Colegero asks Sonny: ‘Is it better to be loved or feared?’ In good Machiavellian form Sonny tells Colegero that ‘it’s nice to be both but that it’s difficult and so he’d rather be feared.’ He tells Colegero that bought friendships are worthless and points out how his foot soldiers all laugh at

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his jokes: ‘I’m funny but I’m not that funny.’ Fear is the key; it keeps the slave loyal and, in a Hegelian sense, ensures recognition. So, as in all good narratives, Hegel’s reflexive action becomes a life and death struggle in which each resolves to destroy the other. In a kind of foiled Mexican stand-off, the one gets the drop on the other and in the doing becomes the other’s master. Both have lived but the other is now forced to recognize the one, to submit, to give due deference as the new self-consciousness of the slave. He goes to work for the master who now appears to have it all. But with this reconciliation has come the diminution of the double entente that kept them as separate and individual – they remain now merely existent and not opposed; their mutuality fails. Fear and servitude remain formative while the master now receives unmitigated enjoyment in guaranteed recognition. But this is one-sided and offers diminishing returns – alterity’s mirror returns something strange about this other self-consciousness. As the slave is forced to recognize and to work it begins to see itself and, in a certain guarded self-satisfaction, comes to realise its own real, subjective presence – its freedom. But this notion is at first abstract; it has a way to go and so true freedom is, in a sense, staged. It first comes to a stoical disposition in which it rationalizes its mere existence, denies the realities of the external world, including its fetters and bondage to its master, keeps a stiff upper lip about its predicament and gets on with life. Then it becomes sceptical about both its bondage and its freedom; it is confused and contradicts itself. Kaufmann likens both the stoic and sceptical dispositions, appropriately, as halfway houses: the stoic denies its reality, despite itself and its predicament, while the sceptic contradicts itself; it has two conceptions of itself that are contradictory. Kaufmann likens the two contradictory poles of scepticism itself to the self-consciousness of the psychoanalyst: the analyst relies on a certain objective and scientific nature to his outlook but at the same time realizes, by means of his own critical reflexivity, that it is unreliable and confused. On this basis he rightly compares scepticism to Sartre’s mauvaise foi, the very ‘bad faith’ by which the subject deceives itself.29 Given Sartre’s relationship to Freud, this is an interesting analysis. When it comes to reconciling these two unwelcome dispositions, even here – where the slave has overcome the master – an ever tenuous intersubjectivity obtains, but the subject will carry a burden, as selfconsciousness is only anguish over its existence and experience – an unhappy consciousness which ‘is itself the gazing of one self-consciousness into another, and itself is both, and the unity of both is also its own

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essence; but,’ writes Hegel, ‘objectively and consciously it is not yet this essence itself – is not yet the unity of both’.30 Again, as Heidegger affirms: ‘the absolute remains the extreme for self-consciousness. Knowing itself thus, self consciousness knows itself as a knowledge which essentially struggles for the absolute, but in this struggle fights its way to a constant subjugation’; this, argues Heidegger, ‘is the knowledge of failure in what drives its own essence. So, selfconsciousness is unhappy, just at a place where it unfolds unto its own essential character ...’ – unhappy because its grip on home is tenuous, because it is, in Heidegger’s terms, ‘knowing’s restlessness, the disruption of not being able to achieve happiness’.31 This struggle for the absolute and a failed zone crossing is nowhere more evident that in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film of Nabakov’s novel Despair (1977). Set in the Weimar Republic in 1932, it tells the story of a successful Russian émigré and chocolate manufacturer Hermann Hermann (Dirk Bogarde), a man in crisis with an unfaithful young wife and an unstable mind. Hermann meets a bum on a park bench who, he is convinced, is his virtual double (his name is already a little more than suggestive of a lurking doppelgänger). He hits upon the idea of murdering the bum (himself), collecting the life insurance and escaping to a new life. The problem for Hermann is that the man he kills in fact looks nothing like him. He escapes to his Swiss hideaway as planned but descends further into madness, his dissociation and paranoia such that he sees himself everywhere and nowhere; his journey into light becomes a journey into a reflexive nightmare, represented by his own refracted image in a broken mirror. As he surrenders to his inevitable capture, he wanders out of his alpine shack, announcing to police: ‘I’m a film actor, I’m coming out!’ Here we can begin to see the real workings not only of the subject but of marginalism and the phenomenological makings of the marginalist disposition. Althusser’s own philosophical reading gives us some clues, if through something of a cloud of (his own) representations, but Sartre’s notion of bad faith (mauvaise foi), while caught in something of a cloud of its own, gives us a measure of the marginalist as a true malafide. Bad faith is a sort of false consciousness in which the subject falls foul of its own unintended lies; that is, the subject ‘who practices bad faith is hiding a displeasing truth or presenting as truth a pleasing untruth. Bad faith then has in appearance the structure of falsehood.’32 It was as close as Sartre could come to the Freudian unconscious. But this question of bad faith has serious implications for the analysis of the marginalist ideology – it is central to the representational

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hegemony that is necessary to the experience of the real but allows us, from a certain perspective, to glimpse the very workings of the real itself. This hegemony is omniscient and will appear without apparent agency or origin – the truth lives by and for the lie. Freud’s famous joke about two Polish Jews who meet in a railway carriage says something of this reason: ‘ “Where are you traveling?” asked one. “To Cracow”, was the reply. “Now see here, what a liar you are!” said the first one, bristling. “When you say that you are traveling to Cracow, you really wish me to believe that you are traveling to Lemberg. Well, but I am sure that you are really traveling to Cracow, so why lie about it?” ’33 A memorable figure of the elaborate ruse of the ‘Jewish joke’ is the character of Jack Crabb, another Piszczykian figure who recounts, with apocryphal elaborations, his experiences in the old American West in Arthur Penn’s film Little Big Man (1970). Like Piszczyk, Crabb finds himself in a variety of oppositional roles and identities throughout his tragi-comic life lived between the Cheyenne Indians – by whom he was raised – and numerous caricatured roles ranging from Christian, gunslinger and snake oil salesman, to mule skinner and something of an Indian scout to General Custer. Crabb had witnessed the slaughter his wife and child and entire Cheyenne camp at the hands of Custer and resolves to avenge his people. But, having attempted to murder Custer, he loses his nerve and falls into despair. Eventually, he entreats Custer to take him on as a scout. Custer, believing Crabb to be a liar, recruits him, explaining to his incredulous Major: ‘Anything that man tells me will be a lie, therefore he will be a perfect reverse barometer.’ As they prepare to enter the fray at Little Big Horn, Custer’s Major advises that it is a trap and that the operation will end in their own massacre. As Custer turns to his ‘reverse barometer’ Crabb for advice, Crabb, in voice-over, explains the looming logic of his vengeance: ‘This time I had him’ says Crabb, ‘but this time what I held in my hand wasn’t a knife, but the truth.’ He proceeds to tell Custer to go down into the valley, if he has the nerve, because thousands of Cheyenne and Sioux braves await him and that all that will be left of him will be a ‘greasy little spot’. Custer impetuously finds himself caught by the lure of truth’s reverse logic. Custer to Crabb: ‘Still trying to outsmart me aren’t you mule skinner! You want me to think that you don’t want me to go down there but the subtle truth is, you really don’t want me to go down there.’ Turning to his second in command before sounding the order to advance: ‘Well, are you reassured now Major?’ Custer’s last stand. Sartre still allows for a certain unity of consciousness which, while tenuous and even vacillating (to use his word, metastable), is ultimately

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guaranteed by the freedom of the reflexive self-consciousness. In spite of Sartre’s proposition of an ontological lack, the subject here traverses the Hegelian subjective interstice – the middle term – with an ultimate subjective and reflective certitude. For Sartre, even in its extreme metastability, the subject returns to itself as a conscious totality: ‘the lie falls back and collapses beneath my look.’34 A brief aside – and another suitably filmic one – on this notion of Sartre’s rendering of bad faith: American film director John Huston had commissioned Sartre to write the screenplay for his film Freud: The Secret Passion (1962). Sartre wrote and rewrote but after some time there was disagreement over the project and the partnership collapsed, Sartre withdrawing his name from the project. According to psychoanalyst and friend J.-B. Pontalis, Sartre would often say of Huston: ‘What’s irritating about him is that he doesn’t believe in the unconscious.’ Pontalis questions this assertion, asking if in fact it was not a case of Sartre’s own ‘piquant turning of the tables or unwitting projection? ... I incline toward the former hypothesis,’ he concludes: ‘For it seems to me undeniable that Sartre succeeded in making perceptible – hence first and foremost in making perceptible to himself – a certain number of phenomena which could no longer be adequately accounted for by the notion of “bad faith” that he had long promoted to “counter” Freud.’35 This is significant as here, too, in this zone crossing might be seen the gamut of subjective fruits and failures, from integrity and bravery through simple infidelity to cowardice and cruelty and, even, madness. The problem obtains in this making perceptible to oneself where, caught in the lures of the crossing, the rotation might indeed be difficult to complete. While this is a problem for all subjects – writing and written – the double entente of rotation is, for the marginalist, a particularly dangerous passage to negotiate. Their reflexive self is tortured by a tripartite guilt: they are the occupier, the collaborator and the victim put to the wall. A group of bourgeois Italians come to explore this restlessness and metastability in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film L’avventura (1960). On a boating trip in the Aeolian Islands off Sicily, one of them – shaping up as a major protagonist, at that – goes missing in this first act of the film. As they explore one of the arid outcrops they soon discover that Anna, girlfriend to the craven Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), has simply vanished. No inkling of drowning, foul play or otherwise suspicious circumstances. And, while her disappearance drives the ensuing narrative, and the amorous interplay between the two remaining leads, she is never to be seen again. The missing character is the mediating void between them. Sandro is an architect who trembles before works that

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merely attest to his lack of substance. A perfect example of the Sartrean malafide, he deliberately spills ink on the work of a young architect copying the ancients in the town square back in Messina before running away like a frightened, spoiled child. When asked by Anna’s girlfriend Claudia (Monica Vitti), who soon takes up with Sandro, if there is any news of the whereabouts of his lover, his answer points to the very problematic of this film at the frontiers of modern alienation: ‘Plenty of contradictions, a few vague clues.’ Anna’s place in the film is progressively annulled as the two remaining characters face each other in an increasing but denied uncertainty, about themselves and each other. Anna is Sandro’s negative term, a reflective, subjective presence he cannot stomach. Claudia takes her place and he has nowhere to turn. One contradiction is masked by yet another to serve the apparent denegation of the subject and the subsequent seamlessness of the narrative of ideology and representations that makes for this film’s eponymous adventure. What has so much theorizing to do with the marginalist, the minoritarian and the writing thereof? As Ireland has adverted to the ‘subaltern appeal to experience’, it is as important to look to the extent to which such an appeal is theoretically founded. And so too (to mess a little with Ireland’s apposition) the intellectual appeal to the margins requires a subject it can grasp and truly objectify. But the marginalist has an ambivalent relation to the subject – they need him but secretly despise him. They prop him up then rub him out; in the manner of the voyeur, they stare then avert their gaze. While marginalists stalk the margins today they do so by a curiously covert method – that is to say, just as the students of culture before them denied their theoretical inheritance, they did not do so by proclamation (that would come later); they did it by progressive denegation. They replaced their influences (now creatively cast as elitist) with oral histories of the street, and all the better if they were marginal voices. And, while they may well have been equipped to do so with a ‘Gramscian bridge’, it wasn’t long before the latter was dispensed with as unnecessary to the project at hand – often a creative installation, video or text and image ‘piece’ that conveniently brought their own subject position closer to voices and images they were recording would do just as well. These subject positions became so close they were, for all intents and purposes, the same. ‘To think is to identify,’ wrote Adorno on this curiously contradictory subject of dialectics. ‘Conceptual order is content to screen what thinking seeks to comprehend. The semblance and the truth of thought entwine.’36 The beginnings of the true marginalist movement.

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While difference is their stock in trade, the marginal fetishist denies this very difference and fixes on a subject (object) that will not only perpetuate this denial but take him or her back to some originary, preseverant state. The important point here is that this fixation forges an impossible identification – an identification across a distance that cannot be bridged – a state of identification which conceals the fact that there is none. In his well-worn Orientalism, Edward Said touched on a sort of orientalist dream-work motif, drawing a (fruitful) distinction between what he called manifest orientalism – ‘the various stated views about Oriental society, languages, literatures, history, sociology’, and so on – and latent Orientalism: an ‘unconscious (and certainly untouchable) positivity’ – the expression (or repression) of a fantasy or a desire for the Orient’s feminine penetrability and supine malleability.37 American filmmaker George Stevens speaks to this mediation in a manner that is beguiling in its very approach to this ‘understanding’. Director of such classic American cinema as Woman of the Year, A Place in the Sun, Shane and Giant, Stevens is maybe less known for his service as Lt Col., Special Coverage Unit of the US Army Signal Corps during World War II. Having documented much of the US military effort from 1943, from the landing of Allied forces at Normandy on D-Day to the division of Berlin in 1945, it was his experience of the liberation of the Nazi death camp Dachau that affected him most. He recorded: All of the outrages of human nature bring these latent and deeprooted emotions to the surface, but nothing like a concentration camp. Everything evil will be exposed in a day. It’s deplorable, because it undercuts one terribly. I would examine it on the basis of what would happen if I was in the other army, the German Army. I mean, I hated the bastards, what they stood for was the worst possible thing that’s happened in centuries, and yet, when a poor man, hungered and unseeing, because his eyesight is failing, grabs me and starts begging, I feel the Nazi, in any human being, I don’t care whether I’m a Jew or a Gentile, I feel the Nazi, because I abhor him and I want him to keep his hands off me. And the reason I abhor him, is because I see myself being capable of arrogance and brutality, to keep him off me. That’s a fierce thing to discover within yourself, that which you despise the most.38 This testimony is hardly mute yet touches on something rarely done in witness narrative. Stevens does more than put himself in the picture,

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reflecting not just on his experience but the very subject position of that experience. While no doubt his particular disposition was critically different from those he would document, Stevens’s reflexive, critical turn here plumbs the depths of human moral life in a manner less than usual, in his time or ours. His testimony shows how difference is based on distance, how intimacy requires a closer relation to distance in order that the true self might be touched. Set in nineteenth-century Hungary as the Hapsburgs set about repressing the resistance of the Hungarian rebels after the revolutions of 1848, Miklós Jancsó’s 1965 film The Round Up captures this existential and ideological relation to distance and difference in a decisive and formal way. The film explores the capture and interrogation of the rebels who appear, like their mysterious caped inquisitors, like so many detached figures in a landscape. Formally the film uses a fortress contrasted by open horizons and sweeping, ever-circular camera movements to declare the vastness of the landscape as that which ultimately incarcerates its figures. ‘There is no place to hide: men are at the mercy of their oppressors,’ says Jancsó’s assistant director, Zsolt Kézdi-Kovács. ‘There are almost no close-ups: the camera moves constantly, keeping its distance, as an impassive observer. We see no more than the prisoners themselves see. The fortress,’ he continues, ‘is always shown through their eyes: the camera walks with them, is one of them. This, and the contrasts of the black and white wide-screen image, the shadows of moving clouds and the sound of the wind, produce a deep feeling of anguish and anxiety. The prisoners are always encircled and the camera moves in circles with them.’39 The landscape is disclosed to its figures only to the extent that it closes on them, weighing on them such that the fortress and the death proffered by the interrogators becomes a retreat from its burden. Jancsó’s form is that of an ideology of repression, of a space that is well articulated by those constructed by fascism. In his landmark testimonials to his own experience of Auschwitz, the Italian chemist Primo Levi also undertook something unusual in the annals of witness testimony, particularly that of the Holocaust. He sought not so much to describe or to give further account of the atrocity exhibition genre of the Nazi Konzentrationslager; his avowed endeavour rather was ‘to furnish documentation of a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind’.40 While this no doubt understates his project, Levi’s distinction lies in his attempts to render neither simple witness testimony nor savage indictment but in his analyses of the ‘concentrationary universe’ of the Lager, which, he posited, ‘may be considered an excellent “laboratory”: the hybrid class of prisoner-functionary constitutes

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its armature and at the same time its most disquieting feature’.41 The camp is a ‘grey zone’ of privilege and collaboration, he argued, plied by all who survived its nebular world where all the extremes of any given culture are both steeped and confused. Levi pressed the unpopular point, arguing that ‘privileged prisoners were a minority within the Lager population, but they represent a potent majority among survivors.’42 Only in these grey recesses, he argued, where simplification is as inadequate to any understanding as mere description, could be found the germ of some appropriate or proper judgement of tormentor and tormented alike. For Levi, this was saliently true of him who survived, as the badlands of the camp experience came to visit the moral life of the mind: ‘Are you ashamed because you are alive in place of another? And in particular, of a man more ... more worthy of living than you?’ he asks of himself and his reader rhetorically, trying to put us both in the picture. ‘You cannot exclude this: you examine yourself, you review your memories, hoping to find them all and that none of them are masked or disguised; no,’ he continues, ‘you find no obvious transgressions, you did not usurp anyone’s place, you did not beat anyone (but would you have had the strength to do so?), you did not accept positions (but none were offered to you ...), you did not steal anyone’s bread; nevertheless, you cannot exclude it.’43 Levi here is yet to fully explore this ‘grey zone’ of the ‘concentrationary world’, and we can already begin to see possible reasons for the relatively late rising of his star among a legion of camp testimonials – ‘his book [If This Is a Man] came and went relatively unnoticed during the period directly following the war, a time,’ suggests Tzvetan Todorov, ‘when people preferred the security of clear-cut positions and radical solutions.’44 And here’s the rub: It is no more than a supposition, indeed the shadow of a suspicion; that everyone is his brother’s Cain, that everyone of us (but this time I say ‘us’ in a much vaster, indeed universal sense) has usurped his neighbour’s place and lived in his stead. It is a supposition, but it gnaws at us; it has nestled deeply like a woodworm; it is not seen from the outside but it gnaws and rasps .... I might be alive in the place of another, at the expense of another; I might have usurped, that is, in fact killed. The ‘saved’ of the Lager were not the best, those predestined to do good; the bearers: of a message. What I had seen and lived through proved the exact contrary. Preferably the worst survived, the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the ‘grey zones’, the spies ... I felt innocent, yes, but enrolled among

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In 1987, shortly after writing these words, Levi took his own life, leaving these questions unanswered but little doubt as to their effect on his capacity to continue living among ‘the saved’. Todorov has argued that Levi’s position is ‘characterized by a double transcendence: he is beyond both hatred and resignation’.46 His refusal to countenance blanket and summary denunciations of the Germans, even his camp tormentors, and his assumption of a reflective, almost circumspect disposition towards the camp experience, sit uneasily with the vanquished narratives of other survivors and most who would come to read or listen. Strangely here, Levi cites filmmaker Liliana Cavani defending her notorious film The Night Porter (1973), about the postwar resuscitation of a sado-masochistic relationship between a camp survivor and her former SS Commandant tormentor. Some years after the war, Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), now married, meets Max Aldorfer (Dirke Bogarde), now a simpering porter at a Vienna hotel at which Lucia is staying with her husband, a noted conductor in Vienna to perform. The hotel is a ghoulish meeting place for former Nazis and others with dubious pasts. Aldorfer is furtive as he awaits trial for war crimes. But their exchanged glances soon turn into a replay of the camp relationship: ‘We are all victims or murderers, and we accept these roles voluntarily. Only Sade and Dostoevsky have really understood this ... in every environment, in every relationship, there is a victim-executioner dynamism more or less clearly expressed and generally lived on an unconscious level.’47 Levi uses Cavani’s explanation of her film against her, arguing plainly that he does not profess to be ‘an expert of the unconscious and the mind’s depths ... but I do know I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer’.48 And this, in the chapter titled ‘The Grey Zone’ in which he speaks of the Special Squads, the ‘crematoria ravens’ (‘corvi di crematoria’) consisting mainly of Kapo Jews, whose task it was to run the crematoria, to act, often brutally, as functionaries of their captors. In this squalid realm, ‘studded with obscene or pathetic figures (sometimes they possess both qualities simultaneously)’,49 Levi describes the ‘grey zone of “protekcja” (a Polish-Yiddish term indicating “privilege”) and collaboration’50 in which a small group of prisoners adapt to and adopt the bestial code that has beset them – the structure of power befitting the relation of master–slave, the very grey zone articulated by Cavani.

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the saved and therefore in permanent search of a justification in my own eyes and those of others. The worst survived – that is, the fittest; the best all died.45

Levi wrote of a certain easy positionality adopted by people and nations after the war, where they ‘find themselves holding, more or less unwittingly, that “every stranger is an enemy”. For the most part,’ he argued, ‘this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason.’51 Levi is speaking of age-old chauvinism here, a politic apparently and avowedly at odds with that of the new critic. But, as he continues, we can see how this very chauvinism – commodified, disguised, sublated – lives and breathes in the new positionality of the critic. When this latency emerges, writes Levi, ‘when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premiss in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager.’52 But here too lies the baleful paradox of the new marginalism. Its privileging of particular and yet putatively disinterested theories of culture – those, in the main, cloaked in postmodern theorizing and postcolonialism and the political vagary of identity – belies residence within a simplistic Manichaeism of its own that is as swiftly denegated as it is uttered.

It is all a recording, really? Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer offers the reader an exemplar of the modern narrative subject: one John ‘Binx’ Bolling, war veteran, stockbroker, amateur cineaste and idler living out his existence in New Orleans, delivers a slice of his own perspective on the real world as Carnival descends around him. While grappling with his morning routine, then reflecting on the amorous cogitations on a girl he sees on a bus, pondering her thoughts and reactions to his own presence there, he remembered the notion of the search that had come to him one day as he found himself face down under a bush: ‘What is the nature of the search? you ask ... The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island. And what does such a castaway do? Why, he pokes around the neighborhood and he doesn’t miss a trick.’53 It sounds familiar but why the search? Percy here uses the explorative nature of the narrative to scout the very nature of apperception, the possibility of a reflexive self and the further potential for some cognitive adventure, simultaneously propelling human subjectivity and tempering what may be termed (in all its banality) the human condition. The idea of the search first dawns on Binx while (in an obvious reference to

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Sartre’s ‘nauseous’ Roquentin) finding himself on the ground, flat on his face, staring down a dung beetle scratching among the leaves. An immense curiosity stirs in him and ‘it’ comes to him, the stunning realization, for the very first time, that he is ‘onto something ... To become aware of the possibility of the search,’ says Binx, ‘is to be onto something. Not to be onto something,’ he propounds as he scans his horizons, his potential, ‘is to be in despair.’54 This, of course, is the well-known existentialist dilemma. But Binx’s eureka moment runs completely counter to the affectability that stalks his progenitor Antoine Roquentin, who, in keeping with his author’s prescription, sinks right back into despair almost as soon as he thinks he’s out of it. Three seconds flat and he’s in despair. He soon discovers that he, like all his fellows, is a simply ‘useless passion’.55 Now here is the apparent crux of a modernist narrative: arguably old news, rooted in all its modern reflexivity, a certain pathetic teleology, doubly-bound in the similarly old news of existentialist philosophizing. What we have here is a subject in exile if he’s there at all. The subject here is a suitably decentred subject, alienated in a modern world that offers little in reflexive return. We have a master narrative (true, in Percy’s case, self-consciously none too masterly, none too normative – this, after all, is the aim of the modernist game), a something both to which this subject is adverted and which he ultimately desires. The mere fact of his desiring, to be onto something, is the motor of his narrative and he takes us along for the ride. What is of interest here is the fact the modernist anti-hero Binx could just as well be in the postmodern shoes of a Deckard in Blade Runner, of Cole in Twelve Monkeys, Ballard in Crash, Madison/Dayton in Lost Highway, Murdoch in Dark City, of Neo in The Matrix ... protagonists in the latter being similarly central to the ‘onto something’ narratives of the postmodern canon. So what separates these narratives? Beyond the sets, the rendering of surface, a kind of reflexive pastiche, of quotation as opposed to genuine or philosophical self-reflexivity, allusions to grand narratives, and so on? In this realm of the postmodern – this is by now axiomatic, if not entirely satisfactory – a certain settlement has been reached between depth and surface: the latter valorized to the extent depth is entirely resident in surface phenomena, in the gleaming (or decaying) façades of a merely projected and represented, repeated and replicated civilization; the former, merely accommodated as myth. A collaboration has taken place. Depth and surface have colluded in a superficial lie that serves to denegate the contradictions that serve the very narrative it drives.

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The important point here is that postmodernism, while eschewing the all too numerous grand narratives that gave rise to it in the first place – from the primacy of the signifier (as a basis of critique), the formal reductions of myth to the real (as played out in a century of painting, photography, architecture, film ... ART) to the privileging of certain epistemological, social or political tenets as evidence of positionalityin-the-world – the postmodern has accommodated them all in the erasures at play in the postmodern moment. While consanguine philosophers and theoreticians of the postmodern muse on the status of the real, of the relation depth-surface, of the positionality (or, indeed, as we have seen, of the very existence) of the subject and its cultural phenomena, it is precisely these phenomena that create a sort of reflexive and serial loop of small narratives, a potential trap allowing for no analysis at all. It is here, in the now less than apparent dichotomy between depth and surface, that the trap inheres – the stratagem of the postmodern: ‘No hay banda! No hay orquesta!’ as a key plot point in David Lynch’s film Mulholland Dr. (2001) testifies: ‘There is no band. There is no orchestra. This is all a tape recording ... It is an illusion.’ And this is a compelling metaphor. The film opens with a beautiful, naïve Canadian, Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), bouncing into Los Angeles seeking the usual fame as an actress. This is a ruse, a narrative façade that throws the spectator’s perspective from the outset – from here, any reading or interpretation, as the film insists, will prove difficult. As the opening sequence, suitably pinkhued and stylized in the manner of childhood memories on film, fades to black we are already in a parlous narrative state. It is a sophisticated faux pas. As the next scene fades in to a night shot of a street sign of ‘Mulholland Dr’ the film begins and we are delivered to Rita (Laura Harring) who, after being injured in a car crash on Mulholland Drive, is holed up in a Los Angeles bungalow which just so happens to be Betty’s aunt’s, where she’ll stay while in Los Angeles and while her aunt is out of town. As Betty arrives she comes upon Rita, tending her own wounds in the shower. Of course, she is suffering amnesia – another erasure – and the story arc will have Betty helping her endeavour to solve her mystery, while trying her wares on a cynical and mysterious Hollywood. Yet Lynch’s particular recording is precisely the means by which a highly over-determined depth discourse (the machinations of repressed desire, thwarted ambitions, the culture industry) is rendered surface: a master narrative, an elaborate realist narrative is effected by means of an apparently superficial narrative ruse – a dream. Betty, it seems, is a

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very real Diane, waking from a nap to find herself the jilted lover of Camilla (the amnesiac Rita). Diane is depressed and, fuelled with pills and alcohol, she masturbates and hallucinates flashbacks of recent traumatic events – those we’ve been privy to, now viewed from a rational perspective – before a fateful denouement. Here, there is in fact no subject to speak of – Lynch’s subject is both double and null, subject to the erasure that is the postmodern premise. Yet, contrary to Lynch’s reputation and the tortuous hermeneutics to which the spectator is subjected, this is not a nihilistic operation, even if he wanted it so. Now the dream-work is hardly superficial, yet it serves the purpose here of a kind of narrative and subjective cover-up, conflating the complexity of its depth – the real depth to which it simultaneously adverts and disavows – with a normative narrative surface. It is all a tape recording … or, to quote William Burroughs’s prognostications upon the fate of the written word and its subject, there’s ‘nothing here now but the recordings’.56 Clearly now a common and superficial narrative theme. Again, while Althusser may have manipulated the subjective selfrefection in Hegel, he did (with some Freudian assistance) draw out the difficulties inherent in relieving the subject of its reflexive burden. For him this relation appears conscious only on condition that it is unconscious (in a manner that escapes them). He recognizes this by arguing that ideology amounts to a complex system of representations – images and concepts – or structures that impose themselves unconsciously and with circuitous complexity. Where modernism cast the subject as decentred, alienated, exiled even, postmodernism effectively erases the subject in a ruse of textual and representative artifice. The dream-work’s apparent reduction of depth to surface has a bearing on all representation in all its forms and, further, is precisely the repressed kernel of this postmodern – or, more properly, the ground contested between it and the modern. Freud writes of such in his The Interpretation of Dreams when he elaborates the dream’s earlier processes of condensation, displacement and representability into the workings of the fourth movement of the dream-work, secondary revision. Here, this process of revision – a kind of interpretation that goes on while dreaming, that is part of the dream-work – allows the dreamer to construct a semblance of reality to the dream by filling its irrational gaps, caused by these earlier processes, with shreds and patches, offering up a representation that obscures the dream’s absurdity and gives the dreamer a clearer and perhaps less confusing or disturbing narrative. It is, of course, a façade and one he likens to the ‘Phantasiebildung’ – ‘imaginative formation’ – at work as much in waking life (especially the

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daydream – Tagtraum) as a kind of waking narrativization of the subtle machinations of slumber. As the imaginary components are already formed in the daydream, the dream-work is spared the labour. But the phantasie is constructed to spare the dreamer, serving as a barrier to traumatic memories.57 It operates then at the extremes of the dreamwork, at the level of both depth and surface. It is, therefore, a tough nut to crack. But, while Freud puts the latent content before the manifest, it is important not to entirely reduce the latter to the former. While the dream-work gives over the dream’s representability in its manifestations, it is the work of interpretation that just might lead to its latency – a job of work with no guarantee. Lyotard draws out the dream’s image from its textual machinations in its manifest content: Phantasie ‘is at once the “façade” of the dream and a form forged in its depths. It is a matter of “seeing” which has taken refuge among words, cast out on their boundaries, irreducible to “saying” ’.58 It is the work of the dream itself that is at stake here, its mode of production, which is formal and lives off artifice. Whit Stillman’s film Barcelona (1995) wryly observes the fate of this form itself (we might just as well say here the subject), as two Americans – the urbane Ted, who is working in the US diplomatic corps, and his cousin Fred on a layover from the US Navy – ponder the meaning of politics and representation in a very foreign country. Fred advises Ted that, while he is waiting for his fleet to arrive in port, he’s been reading a lot and wants some clarification on the nature of the textuality. Fred keeps bumping into the ‘subtext’, which he strangely ‘gets’ as ‘some hidden message or import of some kind’, but wonders about what’s right there ‘right there on the surface, completely open and obvious? They never talk about that. What do you call what’s above the subtext?’ Ted helps his cousin out, pointing him in the direction of the text. Fred: ‘Okay, that’s right, but they never talk about that.’ Stillman inverts the usual narratological play between depth and surface to show that, in postmodernity’s state of play, there is in fact no apparent inversion. Like Poe’s Purloined Letter, it sits there openly on the mantelpiece while the detective work goes on about it, all the while missing its very obviousness. This particular artefact of the text is questioned partly due to the lionizing of the milieu in the fashionable posts of various theorizing (indeed the basis of Stillman’s entire opus), but also by dint of their character’s difficulty to see, to apprehend. It does, however, offer an alibi ... for the critic, the marginalist, whomsoever chooses not to examine the form of their own representative relations.

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A more recent and ominous version of this postmodern erasure may be found in the putatively artistic endeavours of Gregor Schneider. Schneider’s Totes Haus ur (Dead House ur) – part conceptual, part performance art – is the labyrinthine reworking of the (perhaps pathological) space of an inherited family home in postindustrial Rheydt, Germany. Schneider’s small three-storey building has been internally reworked since 1985 by the installation of rooms within rooms, joined by sliding doors and false illuminations from backlit windows that look or go nowhere, and apparently has something to say about the fate of German urban life after the war. It is starkly lit, lead-clad and sound-proofed with passages leading to non-rooms and a damp cellar; the only subject that may exist in this house is one about to be tortured or otherwise disposed of. In fact, some exhibitions of his Dead House have featured figures, half-wrapped in black plastic, that appear to have met such a fate. Similarly, he might sit with another, share coffee and cake, before his guest leaves through a door that opens now onto a cellar, having rotated on its axis. He rebuilds various rooms in various museums and acts out such roles like some menacing Sweeney Todd. According to Auslander, ‘like the psyche imagined by Stanislavski as multiple dwellings, the Totes Haus ur is actually several houses.’ But, he continues: Unlike the orderly psyche described by Stanislavski, in which everything is easy to find until the last crucial moment, this labyrinthine environment felt like a particularly difficult place in which to locate the elusive bead, as if it were an architectural representation of a psyche so turned in on itself that the journey into it leads to dead ends, hazards, and conundrums like windows that open only onto other windows and rooms bathed in light that appears natural but is actually artificial.59 Schneider’s Totes Haus, either in spite of or because of its performative rhetoric, appears to rebuild and represent the nether regions of Bachelard’s topophilia to reach a sort of topophobia, which reduces to a perversion of subjective freedom and agency. The Dead House is, if nothing else, a stark display of the condensation and displacement at play in consciences caught up in human agency before, during or after any war – and, just perhaps, Schneider’s own fantastic Phantasiebildung, the imaginative formation that allows for the pasting over and progressive erasure of the subjective force of narrative.60

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Is anybody home?

We enter the liminal space of Schneider’s Haus via the traversal of a sort of nether land or interstice between Henri Michaux’s ‘horrible inside-outside’ of space’s silence and repressed desires.61 But, where Bachelard’s poetics of the house are neutral – if anything a nostalgia for warm childhood memories – they remain geometrical, marked with discipline and balance. And this is nowhere more true than in Schneider’s Haus, where childhood memories are also invoked, but they are less than warm and arguably invoke trauma. In fact, its discipline is what immediately registers. ‘A geometrical object of this kind ought to resist metaphors that welcome the human body and the human soul,’ wrote Bachelard. And in this case they certainly do, but for a certain pull of fascination with its bald architecture and cold-cut simplicity. ‘But transposition to the human plane takes place immediately whenever a house is considered as space for cheer and intimacy, space that is supposed to condense and defend intimacy.’62 Fascination or fetishization do indeed relate to intimacy, but not that which Bachelard had in mind. Schneider’s space eschews any ‘cheer’ or, indeed, any intimacy that might be welcomed by a Sunday visitor. It is a concrete example of what might be the real difference between the map and the territory – a space of collapsing distance and conflation. The fact is, nobody is at home but the spectre of some fiction represented in the conflationary surface of the architectural map of some unheimlich cell. What is missing is precisely the subject needed to apprehend any shift in terrain, any meaning that may in fact be lost to the surface that now simply reflects it, ad infinitum. As Ruthrof shows us, ‘one can always proceed from semantics to syntax but not vice versa. In the social, as in natural languages, one cannot reconstruct a semantics from a syntax.’63 Godard’s early venture to the margins paid dividends in the form of Vivre sa Vie (1962), which tells (in 12 Brechtian tableaux) the story of the short life of a neophyte prostitute in Paris. The penultimate tableau, titled ‘Nana fait de la philosophie sans le savoir’ (‘Nana philosophizes without realising it’), deals with a conversation between the film’s protagonist Nana (Anna Karina) and structuralist philosopher Brice Parain (as himself) in a Paris café. Nana, a prostitute bereft of love and now forlorn, turns to Parain, who is reading, asking: ‘Why do you read?’ ‘It’s my job,’ he responds laconically. They muse on the nature of the subject, in love and life, and their need to communicate through language, words. Nana has been lied to and words have lost their meaning; they have betrayed her. She wonders why we can’t live in silence out of which might come some truth, the possibility of love. Parain says: ‘We have

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to think. To think we need to speak. There’s no other way. And to communicate, humans must speak.’ Nana asks: ‘What do you think of love?’ Parain: ‘The body had to be brought into it. That’s what came out of German philosophy. We think within the constraints of life and our mistakes, and try to make the most of it. It’s true.’ Their narrative is circular, teleological, a movement suggested in Bertolucci’s film of Paul Bowles’s novel The Sheltering Sky (1990) when Kit, the surviving subject of the narrative, enters a bar at the close of her ordeal in the desert. Having lost her companion and herself to the openness of the desert, she returns to her place of departure, the closed space of the bar, where Bowles himself – reflected in heavily framed mirrors – asks: ‘Are you lost?’ – ‘Yes,’ she smiles, wistfully. She finds self precisely in losing self. The body had to be brought into it, says Parain, though perhaps he should have said the body had to be brought back into it. We have here perhaps the beginnings of what Ruthrof has termed the corporeal turn – a counterpoint to the linguistic turn – which takes cognizance of textuality in terms of the very subject that speaks, that inscribes. Leaning on Merleau-Ponty, he puts the subject and its movement through language and philosophy at the heart of his own project, while arguing that traditional semantics ignores the body in the process of reading and constructing meaning. He proposes an alternative to coldly analytical or syntactical models of meaning in language, arguing that overly formal, syntactic approaches cannot relate, either in theory or practice, to our place in the ‘world’. This we can do only by bumping into it. This parenthesized ‘world’ is cautionary and contingent, like the subject that occupies it; nothing here is to be taken as given.

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4 The Marginalist Refuge of Lies

In Vincent Ward’s 1993 film Map of the Human Heart a compelling and sophisticated piece of border writing is constructed in the telling of a story of the relation between a half-cast Inuit boy, Avik, and the adventurer who would fly, literally, into his life just prior to World War II. Walter Russell (Patrick Bergen) is a cartographer, charting the Northwest Territories for the British when he encounters the young Avik bouncing on a hide like some trampoline. Walter stays with the Inuit and, realizing Avik has contracted tuberculosis, he convinces Avik’s family he should be taken away to convalesce in Montreal. Here Avik meets Albertine (Anne Parillaud), a young half-breed tomboy who is also being treated by the Catholic nuns, who becomes the young boy’s first love. After his return to the Arctic, Avik (Jason Scott Lee) comes to meet his heroic adventurer again when he returns to the north of Canada as an operative for British intelligence in search of a U-boat reportedly trapped in ice. He’s in search of their maps and codes. Since Avik’s return to his homelands the ravages of modernity are already becoming apparent; sparser hunting fields coincide with his return and his own tendency to read books rather than hunt doesn’t help his plight. They believe him cursed. Walter offers to take Avik with him to Ottawa to learn cartography but when the time comes he declines, as his grandmother needs his care. Avik asks Walter to deliver to Albertine an x-ray of her chest he’d kept close to his all these years. As war breaks out Avik joins up as a bombardier and flies sorties for the RAF over Germany and it becomes apparent Walter did indeed visit Albertine and has taken her with him to England, as his wife. She interprets aerial photographs for Bomber Command and Avik determines to communicate with her by sending her coded photographs taken on missions (inscribed by his pet name ‘Holy Boy’, a patois confection exclaimed when he first saw the 89

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majesty of Walter Russell and his modern armoury) as Walter sets his designs on destroying Dresden. An elaborate bodily conceit drives this narrative: the skeletal images of x-rays; aerial reconnaissance photographs of coordinates (by which Avik will, of course, make his way back to Albertine’s heart!); of Walter’s fetishized sculpture of the female form covered in a cartographic découpage; of times gone by; of states of existence that are putatively our provenance, our belonging. The story can’t end well. We already have the ethnic setup that bodes none too well for either Avik or Albertine. Walter is a puppeteer who, duty bound, must destroy Hitler, who, he explains to Avik while they visit in London, is ‘the monster in the room’ surrounded now only by his fine Dresden dolls. All else is destroyed. Walter must enter that room and smash his prize dolls as a means to break his spirit, and so he does. While there are no strategic targets, just civilians, there is a real political necessity to this act (if too, perhaps, some essence of pathological will), as there was to his saving Avik and taking the young Albertine, to his marking out of those coordinates – in physical reality, in others’ lives, in modernity. Here, the protagonist – the subject – is lost to the narrative terrain of history and it is no coincidence that this history is that of a modernity that messes with people’s lives and, patently here, at the margins. Everyone loses, even the apparent victors, and this is indeed the point and narrative dilemma of this film about the lures of modernity and the extent to which we all act out our search for a peculiar but necessarily embracing homeland, be it the Heimat, the arms of a lover, family, a country or an identity – our metaphysical proof. As we realise this story is being told in flashback, to another mapmaker (John Cusack), this time working for a modern oil company in the Arctic, Avik – now a washed-up war veteran bumming drinks off the new colonizers of his land – cautions the furtive cartographer that: ‘It’s all there in the maps. Sometimes all they tell you is that you’re lost.’ The setting of the ontogenesis of Avik’s character in this already liminal space (at least and even for the experienced explorer Walter) of the Arctic in a time of high modernity is key to all relations in Map of the Human Heart and serves as a lucid metaphor for all modern relations. While the protagonists emerge from a triangulation of opposing universes, giving apparent life and depth to the metaphor of cultural and spatial difference, it is germane that in Said’s analysis of the historiography of such difference he adds an important caveat: ‘no matter how one tried to extricate subaltern from elite histories, they are different but overlapping and curiously interdependent territories.’1

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As just one student of the postcolonial has observed: ‘devoid of any familiar European referents, the Arctic eluded European description, measuring, charting, and even physical penetration. This was terrifying, and inadmissible: to allow the Arctic to remain unmapped and unfertilized would be to admit a hole in the great map of euro- expansionism, a space that European discourse could not fill. “The world,” as Schwatka wrote upon entering the Arctic in 1879, “seems to be entirely wrong and man grows nervous and restless.” ’2 While this could well be just so much postcolonial and counterhistorical rhetoric (by now the standard critical reading of such a predicament, of colonial spatial history), the setup does point not only to a problem obtaining in the subject’s relation to place and space, but to an important problem in the subject’s relation to self and others. The fascination with arid spaces and forms and the (unheimlich) restlessness both experienced and depicted serves the marginalist’s argument, that such a cursed malaise is the price to be paid for the imperialist longings of the Western expansionist. But this liminality of both space and subjectivity (the truly phenomenological) is the impetus for both life’s simple drama and the critics who come to watch – the territories are indeed interdependent. It is the metaphysical premise that both drives (and serves) the narrative and theoretical interests of the marginalist, and this particular narrative setup gives us all the necessary pointers to establish the basis of this peculiar affectability. In his ruminations on language Heidegger observed that ‘world and things do not subsist alongside one another. They penetrate each other. Thus the two traverse a middle. In it, they are at one. Thus at one they are intimate.’ By way of etymology, he points out that as close as they come, ‘a division prevails: a dif-ference’. He breaks up the word to distinguish it from its common usage, to assert that it is ‘neither distinction nor relation’.3 This relation world to thing applies equally to humans, in their relations and their histories, intimate or otherwise. This is close to Said’s observation about interdependent territories and a clue to the relationship between the marginalist and their object of study. ‘This is where the claim of their identity obtains that restlessness,’ writes Adorno, ‘that inward shudder, which Hegel calls Becoming.’4

Curiously interdependent territories In the previous chapter I made mention of the ideological and representative machinery by which the marginalist relation is both effected and maintained, where contradictions are conveniently masked by a

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kind of cloud of representations. The marginalist here is of course not alone – this is the terrain of all subjects, though it suits some more than others. Here, theory served both to expose and to hide the mechanisms at play in the relation, but the current state of theory – or at least the relation of critics to theory – is such that it is unlikely to be setting any subaltern free anytime soon. I suggested earlier that his situation served the marginalist position well, that it was not in the interest of the marginalist to be liberating anyone, much less themselves from their own industrial contradictions. Further, now that globalization has driven the international division of labour into the new international division of labour there are more prospective subalterns as well as exotic places to hold and attend conferences. Said’s observation of interdependent territories was something of a theoretical aside, but it does in fact point to a certain industry of interdependency that perhaps would once have been called either Imperialism or colonialism. As the new marketeers of the margins find ever new resources for their enterprise and have adopted a sound protectionist policy that is almost universally accepted (at least where their market share resides), there appears little evidence of a slide. Marginalism is a bull market. In an effort to maintain their marginal space and minoritarian cachet, marginalist critics are keen to retain at least some intellectual and critical endeavour and the Academy continues to play a role as a control base for marginalist sorties, giving intellectual credence to their enterprise. It is true that every few years discourses must reinvent themselves, but postmodernism has proved a resilient and accommodating umbrella, requiring little critical examination of the disciplines under its aegis. Althusser wrote that in the realm of ideology ‘the real relation is inevitably invested in the imaginary relation, a relation that expresses a will (conservative, conformist, reformist or revolutionary), a hope or a nostalgia, rather than describing a reality.’5 But marginalists have no truck with such theorizing of the ideological lest it catch them in its lures, the contradictions at its core. The will expressed by marginalists is essentially conservative and conformist, though if pressed they might put their hands up as reformists; the position of the revolutionary in these climes is untenable. Vološinov put it that ‘individual consciousness is not the architect of the ideological superstructure, but only a tenant lodging in the social edifice of ideological signs.’6 The new marginalists play at the dialectical overcoming of the subject at the margins, and they do not even know it, as they are caught up in the cloud of representations become misrepresentations. Contradictions are

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glossed; their logic is necessarily conflationary, at least as it is acted out. This, however, is by no means some excuse for exculpation; their marginal play exposes them as conformists and collaborators with the very hegemonic system they avowedly eschew. Again, as Stevens described the phenomenon in his own personal struggle in dealing with his experience of the subaltern in the death camps: I feel the Nazi, because I abhor him and I want him to keep his hands off me. And the reason I abhor him, is because I see myself being capable of arrogance and brutality, to keep him off me. What might be called here the parasubjective moment is critical not only to everyday self-consciousness but also to the baleful machinery of the new marginalism – the double movement of displacement and disavowal clearly serves the marginalist well. They are in the manner of the protagonist of Bertolucci’s film The Conformist (1970), based on Alberto Moravia’s novel of the same name. The craven Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who will do anything to inveigle his way into the upper echelon of the fascist bureaucracy of Rome in the 1930s, proposes a little vacational espionage on behalf of the Party as he travels to Paris on his honeymoon. He has information about his former professor of philosophy, Luca Quadri (Enzo Tarascio), now in self-imposed exile, whom he will seek out and report on his antifascist activities. Armed with this information, Clerici is soon dispatched on a real mission, contrived by his new masters, to set up the assassination of his old friend and professor. Girded by the underpinnings of Moravia’s text and Bertolucci’s own political convictions, Clerici is a portrait of the psychopathology of fascism. Indeed, his conformity is pathological – he is tortured by repressed childhood trauma, seeks the approval of others, and is a repressed homosexual with a (perhaps predictable) predilection for order, discipline and bad faith. He is asked by his friend and consort Italo (a blind radio announcer whose knowledge of Quadri’s activities has facilitated Clerici’s mission) what he expects from marriage. ‘The impression of normalcy,’ he replies. Italo is incredulous, remonstrating with him. ‘I don’t understand you. Everybody wants to be different, and you want to be the same as everybody.’ He coldly and distantly observes the brutal murder of Quadri and his wife Lina (Dominique Sanda) through the gap of a car window. Writing on de Certeau, Richard Terdiman sees another movement at play in the margins, based upon a narratological figure of reversal, in which subordination and domination are reversed such that marginality – that is, the real people and spaces of the margins – is ‘rendered opaque .... the paradigm is familiar,’ he argues, ‘and it is rendered by both minority rhetoric and influential segments of the majority. Its political objective

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is to stigmatize the prejudice that projects categorical inferiority ... But in the process the mechanisms of inequality themselves become invisible.’7 Solidarity with the marginalized is given credence and efficacy only when its attendant critic (not a given) looks to the material bases that sustain, not merely the moral affiliation that appears more common. ‘Some versions of cultural studies that concentrated on a multitude of marginalisms effectively institutionalized this inversion,’ he rightly avers. And while these early theoretical (more than political) sorties into the marginal were perhaps important in their early stages, there now lurks the danger of an ‘idealization of marginality that results from projections of its paradoxical benefit’.8 While Terdiman argues de Certeau was seeking out these mechanisms as early as the 1960s and argues his insights might – at this point in the minoritarian inversion, the figuration of reversal – have proved potentially fruitful, it seems this is faint praise. Cultural studies embraced de Certeau’s performative language more than it did his insights, as critical and incisive as they were and, as Terdiman concedes, marginalization, forged in advanced hegemonic modes of communication and its progressive denunciation of diversity, remains – more than three decades after his most important work. Mitigated access to the social participation and exchange that forge a society’s culture and politics is the recipe for marginalization, and, while de Certeau’s theoretical armoury was substantial in its ability to describe these mechanisms, it was insufficient to change them. But, in the process of objectification, the identification, the fantastic incorporation tears at the marginalist in a manner that forges a more complex set of relations in the purported project of anti-identitarianism and marginal communication. The identification at play between the marginalist and the subaltern must be denied lest it give up the game between the two. The relationship is necessarily an intellectually rationalist one which denies the perversity of the relation and which is, of course, necessary to the anti-identitarian and counterhegemonic enterprise. The marginalist is caught up in this confounding contradiction which, by means of a highly effective narrative ruse – an entire industry of representations – works tirelessly at pasting over the cracks. These are problematic times. As Percy indicated in his analysis of the zone crossing that was a salutary occurrence – from Capra’s film It Happened One Night through Swedish urban design to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn – a certain formulaic narrative appropriation of this existential rotation has taken place. The formula, he argues, ran into diminishing returns because ‘this particular zone crossing created its

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own zone, and its imitators, instead of zone crossing, were following a well-worn track.’9 They rationalized the irrational, realizing this strange process of apperception in a manner that ultimately collapsed its very possibility. A similar process might be observed in the narrative terrain of marginalism. The overdetermined interplay of the real to the imaginary forges ideology as a process that is apparently conflationary rather than contradictory. The subject doesn’t stand a chance.

The marginalist poetics of erasure ‘Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality,’ wrote Borges of the machinations of narrative, adding that ‘Cervantes takes pleasure in confusing the objective with the subjective, the world of the reader and the world of the book.’10 This confusion he elaborates via the well-known story of The Thousand and One Nights in which a cuckolded king murders his wife and determines that, all women being unfaithful, he will every night take a virgin and have her slain the next morning. One of the king’s vizier’s daughters, the bookish Scheherazade, pledges to marry the king in order to save all the other Muslim daughters. She succeeds in entertaining the king with her stories over the thousand and one nights, bears him children and saves herself. The Thousand and One Nights is an overdetermined narrative of magic, adventure, parable and poetry that, as Borges has it, ‘duplicates and reduplicates to the point of vertigo the ramifications of a central story in later and subordinate stories, but does not attempt to gradate its realities and the effect (which should have been profound) is superficial, like a Persian carpet’.11 The sheer length of the piece obliged the story’s many copyists over the centuries to make numerous interpolations, one of which for Borges marks a perturbing turn in this already vertiginous confection. Here the heroine Scheherazade contrives an elaborate metafiction that potentially unhinges its internal drama. By drawing into her narrative the beginning of the story, what brought her there in the first instance, all the stories told her king hitherto and – monstrously – that story she is telling itself, Borges sees a ‘curious danger’ for the reader in which both they and the Mohammedan king are condemned to a story rendered now infinite and circular. While Borges avers that every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality, it is Cervantes’s proto-modernist conflation or confusion that is central to the dangerous problematic he poses in The Thousand and One Nights. It is not a question of authorial power but one of relation or acceptable distance that makes for a palatable (or normative) fiction and it is this same confusion or conflation – the mechanism of erasure – that

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The inventions of philosophy are no less fantastic than those of art: Josiah Royce ... has formulated the following: ‘Let us imagine that a portion of the soil of England has been levelled off perfectly and that on it a cartographer traces a map of England. The job is perfect; there is no detail of the soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not registered on the map: everything there has its correspondence. This map, in such a case, should contain a map of the map of the map and so on into infinity.’12 Borges invokes Royce to conclude the disturbing force of such metafiction lies in the possibility ‘these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious.’13 Baudrillard used both Borges and this smart allegory to negate the terrain of the real, cementing its allegorical intent by making the declaration that in these postmodern times the ‘territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it ... the map that precedes the territory ...’14 Postmodern and nihilistic hubris, doubtless, but, by implicating the constructive postmodernist Borges, in an essay in which he reflects on the relation of the real to the imaginary (in Cervantes and others) in a manner that problematizes the constitutive machinations of the subjective moment in narrative, the postmodern ruse is exposed for the artifice it is. The topographical predilection – of explorers, historians, artists, of degenerates, even – has been observed by Paul Foss as ‘a way to mobilize the pull between “here” and “there” ... to locate a place as possible, as within reach, as proximate, by a play of immediacy which changes outland into environment, the hostile into home’. Foss (borrowing from Baudrillard and a little from the tortuous cartography of Deleuze and Guattari) here is onto the narrative and reflexive machinery that connects both the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the ‘enounced’ – subject positions that have more in common than their functional narrative roles would at first suggest: ‘maps are stratagems for the abolition of distance. In this function maps rejoin with the true role of visual images. They constitute vanishing lines, escape machines, a beacon of fascination.’15

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is the means by which both postmodernism and marginalism come to efface their own marginal subject. The conflationary movement is developed further by Borges by way of a story (a narratological conceit) by Josiah Royce of a hypothetical map of England so detailed as to actually cover the terrain surveyed. Borges paraphrases Royce:

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In this reduction of distance there is also a certain diminution of difference which closes on identity, which, we already know, is at odds with the anti-identitarian and counterhegemonic enterprise. At work in this pull between here and there are simultaneously a progressive denegation – of the marginalist’s object – and a subjective fortification of the marginalist himself. This fortification is rendered from a space which is not, or appears not to be, home (heimisch) – a subjective outland fostered in the fetishistic projections of the marginalist from his bedsit window. As maps indeed rejoin with the true role of visual images – in all their reflexive manoeuvring – they portray vanishing lines only on an ineffable vanishing point (trompe-l’oeil), and while there is a certain marking out of fascination the only escape machine on offer is one perhaps glimpsed in a distant haze. Visual images are constitutive and formative, no matter how disconcerting, and so too they rejoin with the identitarian and metaphysical rendering of the subject – the lures of the cartographic stratagem hold. Where Borges might still hold up a mirror, Baudrillard pounces, proposing the onset of a black hole of signification in which the reference principle is not only flawed, it has imploded – his wild structuralism goes sci-fi. The relation of map to territory, of image to real, has fused, leaving no possibility of differentiation between sign and referent. Representation is no longer tenable as reference is swallowed in the collusion between the image and the real – all that is left is a kind of lost terrain: ‘the desert of the real itself ’.16 Borges’s fable has, argues Baudrillard, erased all notions of abstraction, metaphor – mirror myths, maps, doubles, and so on – or paradoxical relations, all of which have been disposed to a hyperreal generated by code.17 Appearances here are not here to be taken as tricks that mask or (falsely) represent the real, since (in this apparently new terrain) appearances are the real but a real, as Baudrillard’s curious postmodern structuralism would have it, without metaphysical or referential ground. But, it must be put, the metaphysics holds, the hyperreal is the fiction – the stratagem. Royce’s ‘perfect map’, serial as it is, still holds reference for the land it charts – ‘everything there has its correspondence’. While Borges poses something of a logical narrative danger, his infinite and circular premise is in fact a narrative and metaphysical guarantee, forging a text that is all the more masterly and, therefore, all the more hegemonic as it offers neither subject – neither character nor reader/spectator – the possibility of escape. It is dangerous to the extent only that we see it coming. This impossibility of metaphysical escape, despite monumental and influential tracts by Heidegger and his deconstructionist legacy, is conceded,

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if lamentably, by Derrida himself, shrinking somewhat from his imputed grandiosity. He is questioned by Kristeva on the logocentric and ethnocentric limits of representation and why they may not serve the metaphysical escapee all that well. While Derrida concedes that the concept of the sign will have been a logically mitigating factor in the escape plan, he prognosticates: ‘I do not believe, that someday it will be possible simply to escape metaphysics.’18 The structuralist and poststructuralist enterprises have allowed for a certain critique of the sign form and its role in communication and representation – allowing for some critical work and displacement – but the critique appears to have pointed merely to the fact that ‘the concept of sign belongs to metaphysics.’19 So, for Derrida, the escape may not be impossible but nor is it simple – and the route, in fact, has yet to be discovered. Further, in what may come as a surprise to the students of culture, especially of the logocentric and ethnocentric limits we might call the margins, he counsels: ‘There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics. We have no language – no syntax and no lexicon – which is foreign to this history; we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition,’ he further concedes, ‘which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.’20 Derrida’s project is, of course, at the centre of this very attempt at escaping metaphysics – and, of course, the grand narratives pitched at its representative logic – but while the sign has undergone a certain uprooting there is little evidence that it has pointed in any direction other than back to its metaphysical ground – the old cartoon trick of turning the sign at the crossroads ... Žižek, in a moment of critical acuity, also seems to assent to a certain closure, if qualified by a mere musing, the posing of a question in a certain distantiating naïveté: ‘What if, perhaps, the fundamental metaphysical impetus is preserved in this very drive to traverse the metaphysical closure – what, that is, if this impetus consists,’ he probes, ‘in the very striving towards meta-, beyond the given domain perceived as a closure? In other words, is not the only way effectively to step out of metaphysics, perhaps, precisely to renounce the transgressive impulse and to comply with the closure without restraint?’21 A later Baudrillard, coming more via Hegel than Nietzsche, will look to some of this work and displacement that had already begun to expose this very stratagem for what it is, in another place, another time. Writing on Brecht’s epic theatre and specifically his use of his famous Verfremdungs-effekt (estrangement or defamiliarization effect), he touches on the importance of this term for subjectivity and its

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relations: ‘ “Verfremdung” means becoming other, becoming estranged from oneself – alienation in the literal sense.’22 This is precisely the defamiliarization Brecht had in mind – an uncovering of the reflexive processes, which exposes a subject left to stand and contemplate its relation to otherness, to world – how the subject itself is subject to representation. But Baudrillard looks to the difficult and somewhat contested root of this term and delivers us to a surprising reversal of his arid fictions: ‘Entfremdung’, by contrast means to be dispossessed of the other, to lose all otherness. Now, it is much more serious to be dispossessed of the other than of oneself. Being deprived of the other is worse than alienation: a lethal change, by liquidation of the dialectical opposition itself. An irrevocable destabilization, that of the subject without object, of the same without other – definitive stasis and metastasis of the Same. A tragic destiny for individuals and for our – self-programming and self-referential – systems: no more adversaries, no more hostile environments – no environment at all any longer, no more exteriority .... The paradigm of the subject without object, of the subject without other, can be seen in all that has lost its shadow and become transparent to itself.23 This tragic destiny of self from other, this anti-dialectical removal of the other is at once the removal of self. Indeed, no more reflections and no more relations. This is Baudrillard’s extreme end – the metastasis of production, commodification – the perfect crime of postmodernity and one about which he is less than sanguine.

Let’s not talk about that At play in the marginalist endeavour is an elaborate strategy of collaboration and collusion, effected by the denial of contradiction and the elevation of conflation and erasure to an ideal art. Conflation and erasure are central to the politics of marginalism. Lyotard writes lucidly (if a little too performatively) of a certain politics of forgetting, of the silence of the let’s not talk about that kind of position adopted by many of the survivors of the Nazi concentration camps and, as something of a leitmotif, the silence adopted by Martin Heidegger after the war. He writes of the need to demystify this collusive erasure by bringing the forgotten to the fore, by making it unforgettable. He evokes ‘the notion of “Judeo-Christianism” – which is fashionable after Auschwitz, a way of conserving the horror by repressing it, where the

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forgetting of the forgotten, of the Other, persists ... “the jews” and the Christians make two’. 24 This is noteworthy given Lyotard’s erstwhile renunciation, in the name of the postmodern, of the metanarratives of – inter alia – Hegel, whose dialectical movement of sublation (Aufhebung) he silently mobilizes and puts to his own service. He puts the Catholic church at the centre of this making two which he sees as culpable, party to the ‘soft hatred’ that integrated ‘ “the jews” into a permissive collectivity in the name of “respect of differences” between the “ethnocultural” components of what remains of the old modern nations. One has to keep in mind,’ he argues, ‘that “catholicism” means to militate according to totality and in view of it, and that tollere and aufheben connote, at the same time, the suppression as well as the elevation of what one tolerates.’25 And he is right to call it this way, if indeed by means of another grand narrative. A palpable example of these sublationary moves may be seen in the massive popular appeal in the early 1990s of Henryk Górecki’s modern classical ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’ (1976). As commemorations for the fiftieth anniversary of the German invasion of Poland were televised live from the Opera House in Warsaw, including music by Beethoven, Mahler and Schoenberg, Górecki’s symphony was played out in a more sombre but no less eclectic performance in the rebuilt thirteenthcentury church of St Magnus in Brunswick, Germany.26 ‘The programme began with an early Kyrie by Mendelssohn-Bartholdy; and in witness to the crimes of those who scorned all ... the Enlightenment what it stood for, it continued with Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw ... it was a concert without interruption or applause, without introductory messages or mediating prayers. The only written words were those of Brecht’s poem “An die Nachgeborenen” (“To those who come after”), the only spoken ones, those of Schoenberg’s “Survivor”.’27 Something of an elegy to survival – of the Jews and partisans of Warsaw, Auschwitz, of Poland, of the relation Mother–Son, the human spirit – and bearing witness, the symphony consists of three movements introduced in the first by a way of a Polish folk Christian prayer, ‘Lamentation of the Holy Cross’, dating from the fifteenth century. The second movement casts the words of a ‘prayer inscribed on the wall of cell no. 3 in the basement of “Palace”, the Gestapo’s headquarters in Zakopane – “No, Mother, do not weep/Most chaste Queen of Heaven/ Support me always./Zdrowas´ Mario [Ave Maria]” – beneath is the signature of Helena Wanda Błaz˙usiakówna, and the words “18 years old, imprisoned since 26 September 1944.” ’28 The third movement, another Polish folk song, is that of a mother’s lament for her dead son.

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While the girl evidently is Catholic (she is here, in any case, one of the ‘jews’ as Lyotard would have them), the music is often broadcast on television accompanying footage of the collected belongings of the Jews and images of the liberation of the camps. This musical paradox was played out too at the other end of the Jewish experience in the coverage by much Western media of the funeral of assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995 and seems a serial accompaniment to documentaries and/or promotions for documentaries on the Holocaust on ‘The History Channel’ (AETN). If we consider the fact that the latter, due to its almost obsessive programming of military history, especially that of World War II and the role of Nazi Germany, is now commonly referred to as the ‘Hitler Channel’, we come even closer to a Hegelian double entente.29 Here we encounter the work of simultaneous conservation and repression – and Lyotard here was right: the Jewish experience is both conserved and repressed in the sublation of a Christian prayer, a way of conserving the horror by repressing it. This conflationary space of identification, of fetishism and fantasy, is everywhere evident in cultural studies discourse and marginalism and particularly in their mobilization in cinema studies, which no doubt takes as its business the reflexive space of the subject, the images that cultivate that very identification. Fantasy gives form to our desires and at the same time mediates between our gaze and its object: it is an agent of conflation and collusion. On Dennis O’Rourke’s controversial film The Good Woman of Bangkok (1992), a ‘documentary fiction’ about a First World white male documenting the life and work of a Thai prostitute and the relationship that subsequently develops between them, Chris Berry points out a contradiction in certain feminist critiques of the film which posit the Thai female subject of the film, Aoi, as powerless before O’Rourke’s camera: ‘... these western women reviewers need to maintain women as victims in order to retain their power as critics,’ writes Berry, ‘they maintain their distance and power at the expense of reducing Aoi to a totally disempowered victim, whereas O’Rourke-the-filmmaker does not.’30 Where the filmmaker here explores his subject’s potential agency within a problematic of sexual and geopolitical exploitation, the critic must reduce that agency to simple victimization. ‘O’Rourke-thefilmmaker does not,’ but if he were to do this the process would not be simple. O’Rourke, like Brecht in his The Good Person of Szechwan (the work of which is in quotation here) and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, attempted to avoid the sort of ‘sentimental chinoiserie’31 of those narratives that predate or foreground his own work – punctualizing representation with

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gestural formulation and rejecting the notion of truthful or at least truly objective discourse in the documentary form. The film here and its maker pose a range of ambivalences and dichotomies, and again, since extremes are difficult to negotiate, foreignness and distance close on the familiar, emerging like Said’s ‘new median category’ that allows one to see new things ... as versions of a previously known thing. The means of controlling the potential threat here is intricated in the problematic of both racial and sexual difference, the new median category beaming forth as either paragon of patriarchal exploitation or Third World victim with a living narrative, depending on the perspective adopted. The difficulty here is that Aoi (played by actor and prostitute Yaowaiak Chonchanakun) speaks, but critics – not their ‘filmmaker–colonizer’ – seem deaf to her speech: again, the threat is muted, familiar values impose themselves ... A far more subtle and difficult variation of this theme of fetishistic identification is ‘articulated’ in Tran Anh Hung’s film Cyclo (1995). I qualify articulation here since, again, we find a palpable example of the conflation between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the ‘enounced’, the knowledge or intent of which, on the part of the filmmaker, can only be surmised. Set in modern-day Ho-Chi-Minh City, the film tells the story of the disintegration of a family after the theft of a pedal cab. In order to pay his debt to the ‘Boss Lady’ owner of his cyclepousse, ‘le cyclo’ (Le Van Loc) is pressed into the service of her thugs and finds himself drawn into the criminal underworld in the tutelage of its main protagonist, ‘la poéte’ (Tony Leung). The players here are given appellatives (viz. ‘le cyclo’, ‘la poéte’, ‘la soeur’) rather than appellations, insinuating that proper names may close the reflective distance we are meant to hold, that must be maintained between a voyeur and his object. The Poet is a brooding thug with sensitivities such as nosebleeds and a tendency for a reflective poetic narration, intimating the nature of the country in which he resides (the nature, that is, as perceived by its transnational Viet–French filmmaker who lives in Paris). The Poet is the true subject of the film, the Cyclo a simple messenger, a narrative ruse. The Cyclo’s Sister (Tran Nu Yên Kê) loves the Poet. He urges her into prostitution, experiencing some kind of vicarious pleasure through the apparently high-class and fetishistic johns he procures for her. He waits, looks and ponders as she endures the increasingly violent attentions of her clients. As he pimps for her in a nightclub, pocketing a large wad of money from one of his customers, the Poet’s nauseous reflections are accompanied by the rising lyrics of

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a Western pop song – Radiohead’s ‘Creep’. The Sister dances alluringly, red dress, hand-cuffed, sexualized now in a way hitherto not realized and subsequently brutalized and violated by her client. The Poet exacts his revenge, stuffing her earnings in the mouth of his murdered client. The cultural conflations and the vacillations are numerous. ‘Le cyclo’, ‘la poéte’, ‘la soeur’ are all symptomatic, each reflecting sides to a subjectivity caught in the refractive real of Saigon’s apparent modern-day pathology. Tran here avowedly quotes Schrader–Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and Zavattini–de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), affixing the unfamiliar (the underbelly of present-day Vietnam) to something established (savage narratives of Western realism) in a representative/narrative form that establishes its characters through exploitation, its subjects emerging from between delight and fear. This is not a bad thing – this film explores, with cultural acuity, the mechanisms of fantasy and fetishism in a manner that is salutary, for both an analysis of the new Saigon and the marginalist enterprise which seeks its quarry in such exotic quarters. The fantastic and fetishistic circle is complete, though perhaps not in a manner that would comfort the marginalist. The Poet–Sister relation expresses this situation of fetishistic economy most forcefully as it accommodates a perspective (Western or Eastern) of primal fantasy, its re-enactment, its denial ... the Poet looks, the Poet looks away ... the subject’s desire for a pure origin that is always threatened by its division. Tran’s film eschews any kind of orientalist perspective on Vietnam – the Western eye looks, but it too must also look away. Complicity, cultural or otherwise, is its currency. As Stevens points out, whether Gentile or Jew, I hate the Nazi ..., but there’s no doubt the question of racial and cultural difference here is germane. Speaking on the work of Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall articulates a specular (Hegelian–Lacanian) theory of racism: ‘The racism appears in the field of vision. But he [Fanon] sees something else ... the sexualised nature of the look. Looking,’ he continues, ‘always involves desire – there’s always desire, not just to see, but to see what you can’t see, to see more than you can see, to see beyond, see behind. The reaction in racism between black and white, partly arises when the white looker becomes aware that he is attracted to the black subject. The act of racism,’ Hall concludes, ‘is a denial of that desire which is, in the gaze itself.’32 And Fanon himself wonders at the possibility, on the basis of the specular fixation posited in the Lacan’s mirror stage, of the reflection of a Negro for the narcissistic little boy. Would the child ‘undergo an imaginary

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aggression’ with this startling appearance? ‘When one has grasped the mechanism described by Lacan,’ he argues, ‘one can no further doubt that the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man.’33 Fanon’s extension of this black/white specularity to a certain fantasy structure he believes inheres, especially, in both white and black women – the black woman’s desire to marry white, white woman’s latent desire to be ravaged by the Negro male, and so on – remains something of an awkward hurdle for postcolonial feminism as it seeks its composure in the struggle for postcolonial theoretical ground across a socio-sexual and racial divide. Fanon’s theoretical position in relation to the homosexual too has been a space of confused contest – the lures of desire and disavowal? – in particular circles of cultural studies. The denial of desire in the very role of consciousness, this play of forces across a middle term to the extremes, resides in the circularity of the grey zone, despite any notion of Aristotelean moral virtue, of the mean between extremes. Both intellectual and moral virtue, for Aristotle, find themselves at the mean, struggling for a position which is, ultimately, a test of human virtue and character. But this middle point might well be difficult to locate. ‘This is why it is hard to be good, because in each case it is hard to find the middle point; for instance, not everyone can find the centre of a circle, but only the person with knowledge .... since hitting the mean is extremely hard, we must take the next best course, as they say, and choose the lesser of two evils.’34

The centre of the margin By de Certeau’s prescription, the marginals, now axiomatically a silent majority, but sunk still in the fetishism and fancies of the consumer grid of commodity capital, will emerge through the very tendencies of capital itself – by engaging with these consumer items, including their consumption of popular media. Further, he proposes that workers can take ownership of their destiny by mobilizing their own creative labour in the workplace, even under the steely gaze of the boss man, by what he calls la perruque – the act of undertaking work of one’s own while on the payroll. He argues by this measure ‘we can play the game of free exchange ... create networks of connivances, and sleights of hand ... and in these ways we can subvert the law .... To deal with everyday tactics in this way would be to practice an “ordinary” art.’35 As Yúdice adroitly points out, such tactics are mobilized similarly but to greater effect by

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the boss man himself and others who enforce the rule of work, such as ‘inside traders’ on the stock exchange, who ‘demonstrate that elites also practice these “popular tactics” to their own ends, ripping off the “system” much more profitably than any worker or “marginal” person’.36 While he admits here that this cohort is well short of being an homogeneous class, he paints an interesting if unwitting picture of its symptom, its own tendency: immigrant workers, he rightly argues, do not have the same access to information or financial means as their new First World brethren but, he goes on to suggest, this might explain a certain cynicism and ‘deviousness’ towards the very culture that contains them and, one can only extrapolate, the academics and intellectuals who are enjoined to come to their assistance in military-like ‘actions’ and ‘engagements’ from within this ‘consumer grid’.37 Speaking on the postcolonial migrations and the relationship between ethnicity and cultural identity in his home country, de Certeau had it that ‘socio-cultural mixing and ethnic difference in France is still largely occulted’ but that even so, somehow, somewhere in the sphere of social communication (we could just as here say social order, as distance closes on difference), the immigrant living in, say, Clichy-sous-Bois, is the central figure: ‘we are all immigrants,’ he avers with an inclusive flourish, ‘that is, social-cultural voyagers caught in situations of transit in which real immigrants are the first victims, the most lucid witnesses, the experimenters and inventors of solutions.’38 While there is no doubt de Certeau was something of a nomad (certainly a migrant) during his peripatetic career, he is less than convincing on this note of cultural and ethnic inclusion. The French immigrants of whom he speaks are largely émigrés of the Mahgreb, and of Algeria in particular, and it is these immigrants who are occulted in his very own discourse. This is a palpable dismissal and disavowal (always interesting when coming from a purveyor of psychoanalytic theory) of the failures at play in his own theoretical project. He sets it up with the adjectives real and first, initially indicating their difference from his own position, as a migrant of choice, then closing that distance by painting one and all as pioneers of civilization in the French multicultural melting pot. A convenient take on the issue, no doubt, and a big wager on the affirmative reflexive impact of marginal crossings on the identitarian centre. But his interlocutor continues, girded perhaps by the Jesuit’s status in the field, taking from his statement that the immigrant is then the central figure of ‘a modernity that deprives everyone of familiar landmarks, forcing everyone to adapt new codes’.39 Some deconstructive salve for French guilt?

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Michael Haneke puts paid to this particular French denegation in his film Caché (Hidden) (2005). Here a typical bourgeois family finds itself under surveillance, and it is being made plain to them, but to what end they don’t know. Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil), a television book club presenter, his publisher wife Anne (Juliette Binoche) and their teenage son begin receiving video recordings of their apartment, their comings and goings, and so on. The camera and person recording them are nowhere to be seen, any clues to this invasion of their privacy lying apparently in the surveillance tapes. As the tapes – accompanied by violent, childlike drawings and menacing phone calls – keep coming, their collective edifice begins to crack. Georges is hiding something and as we come to follow him and his tortured contemplations and dreams more closely we realise it’s a childhood memory. In flashback we are shown Georges as a spoiled child living on a farm when an Algerian boy named Majid (one of de Certeau’s real and first) is orphaned by a state-sponsored ratonnade against Algerian immigrants protesting in Paris in 1961. He enters Georges’ world, soon to be adopted, it seems, by Georges’ father. Georges is jealous and confects lies and a deed that see the young Majid hastily expelled, never to return. The clues eventually lead Georges to the address of the adult Majid (Maurice Bénichou), subsisting in the suburban project housing of Paris. It appears he survived his childhood rejection but missed out on the future, health and good fortune now being enjoyed by Georges. The mild-mannered Majid appears to want nothing from Georges, plausibly denying he had anything to do with the tapes. Georges’ bourgeois guilt gets the better of him and instead of confronting, even contemplating his actions and their consequences, he threatens Majid, with violence and other injunctions that bode none too well for a happy ending. The Algerian motif in the film is something of an old chestnut – French guilt about the effects of both colonization and decolonization – and, while in and of itself it is background to the proceedings of the film, Haneke draws strong allegorical implications, not only for France as a country (among many) but for subjectivity itself. The story too is ostensibly centred on the relationship between a Frenchman and an Algerian émigré, and while there is reference to Algerian strife in France – an infamous protest called by the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in October 1961, a subsequent police massacre ordered by the then Prefect of Police (‘Papon. The police massacre’) in which many Algerians were either shot or beaten and reportedly thrown into the Seine (Majid’s parents among them) – the film is about colonialism only to the extent that it is about what it takes for the colonizer to colonize, the subjective

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capacity to elide certain behaviours and complicities (‘October. Enough said’), the way in which the subject comes to struggle with difference and distance by a progressive denegation. Caché operates by establishing two important and related motifs that eventually close on each other: an enduring, distantiated relation between people, articulated by the voyeuristic distance maintained by the static camera and the alienation it both illustrates and creates; and a similarly enduring difference between certain subgroups of people – class, race – that is maintained socially by distance and denegation, but which is not allowed that luxury here. Alienation here is pivotal and it sits between difference and distance and we are forced to enter that very space as both viewers and subjects. Georges’ memories surface (both dream and day-dream) but these are unreliable and most likely serve as something of an unusual admixture of screen memories for Georges – their violence and figuration of his innocence and apparent terror at the young Majid’s actions serve to validate Georges’ reactions then and his protestations now – but his insistence he’d forgotten about the incidents attests to their repressive and defensive nature and puts their veracity under scrutiny. In parallel with these scenes is Georges’ persistent denial and lack of self-reflexivity which act at every level in his life, and clearly have done so hitherto. This takes us back some way to the topographical predilection to coordinate place as possible, proximate. But this too brings with it an uneasy closeness to difference, especially its people, as distance closes. Decolonization has exacerbated these subjective tendencies as the distance has closed to the extent that the modern bourgeois subject is forced to entertain the middle term of the us in them and the them in us. As the Tunisian writer and psychoanalyst Albert Memmi pointed out, ‘the day the oppression ceases, the new man is supposed to emerge before our eyes .... this is not the way it happens. The colonized lives for a long time before we see that really new man.’40 And this too applies to the colonizers. So, Caché is most certainly about margins, but deeply personal, intersubjective liminal spaces, where meaning obtains. Hidden. Writing on de Certeau, Terdiman argues ‘there is an impulse within certain versions of poststructuralist thinking that radicalizes difference to the point that the possibility of response seems to fade out entirely,’; while poststructuralism has articulated better than most the degree to which all relations entail constraint, he argues that in attempting to subvert those constraints implicit in the system that defines subjectivity – alterity, communication – ‘there is a cost to the freedom thus conceived. To decline relation shuts down the dialectical structures of alterity and

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the possibility of response.’41 While de Certeau cannot be accused of declining relation, his eagerness to close on the distance in alterity – to assert relation – seems completely at odds with his avowed project. A highly regarded scholar of Hegel – the philosophy of the latter is redolent in his work – de Certeau was alive to this very difficulty but seemingly sought to overcome it by the kind of inclusiveness mentioned above, by inserting ourselves in the other in question, by making the them and the us a we. This movement is indeed far from dialectical – it is not even, in the manner of Levinas, dialogical, having regard to a space of engagement between the one and the other – it is conflationary and spatially bereft. Terdiman argued de Certeau’s project aimed ‘to detect the voice of the other despite the pressures exercised by our own seemingly sovereign subjectivity and by homeostasis ... This is the project his heterology adumbrates. But,’ he conceded at the time of writing, ‘it is a science whose paradigm still remains to be developed and solidified.’42 I would argue that it has indeed developed and solidified as the marginalist has now entered the normative sphere of culture, closed distance on difference while still shouting its name. So dialectical it is not, contradictory it is. This is heterology as the unwitting project of the marginalist and de Certeau, it appears, both gave Haneke some good theoretical material with which to work and also wrote his review. Something of this bourgeois space of distances and difference – also partly demarcated by the condensations and displacements of childhood memory and day-dream – is also uttered in emblematic fashion in Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris. As Jeanne plays out her life for a film being made by her boyfriend Tom (Jean-Pierre Léaud), she visits her family home on the outskirts of Paris (much like Georges’ childhood home), and the grave (replete with headstone and epitaph) of her childhood pet dog, Mustapha. At this point her former nanny enters the frame: ‘Dogs are worth more than people, much more,’ she says barely greeting her former charge. (A figure of reversal?) Jeanne introduces the old crone to the camera: ‘Meet Olympia, my Nanny,’ she says with a roll of the eyes. Olympia continues, ‘Mustapha could always tell the poor from the rich. If someone well-dressed came in he never stirred. But if someone scruffy came in, you should have seen him! What a dog!’ Jeanne’s father was a Colonel in the Algerian war and according to Olympia ‘trained the dog to recognise Arabs by their scent’. Jeanne addresses the camera: ‘Olympia is a compendium of domestic virtues. Faithful, admiring, and racist’. It is precisely these domestic virtues and pluralism de Certeau was seeking to reconcile at the time this film was

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made but ideology is stubborn, and marginals were just as likely, if not more, to follow Gaullism as centrists. But it is no coincidence when Paul, at the film’s dénouement, mockingly wears Jeanne’s father’s military cap and salutes her as he clips his heels we come to feel the deep, hidden resentment of these very domestic virtues – despite her apparent free spirit, Jeanne has been running from these all her life. Like Georges, she learned to accommodate them, to collaborate with them and, always, disavow them. Paul is greeted with the barrel of her father’s gun.

Figures in a landscape? And meantime, deserts are crossed, if by modern transport, spaces still demarcated, as marginal. Egyptian poet in exile Edmond Jabès, something of a hero of marginalist literature and study, found his centre in the very place of his Parisian unbelonging – it was here that he belonged, or, at least, sought a semblance of belonging. Speaking of his own situation, the French-speaking Jabès wrote that when a foreigner seeks refuge in a country whose language he knows, ‘he finds his place there. But,’ he asks, ‘where in fact is this place?’43 And this is a very good question. While he writes of and at the margin, Jabès’s true writer–subject, the contemplative and wandering Yukel of his poetic prose, harks to the centre – a position reaffirmed when Jabès answers his own question: ‘His place is the very place of language ... Language is the exile’s true homeland.’44 Here again we find an expression of the exilic paradox, a kind of oxymoron: for Jabès, language is a decentring, displacing process – but it is precisely this displacement that renders place – in true Hegelian form, it has its end for its beginning. There is no distance between the text and the place about which it writes. It emerges that the narrative of displacement is simultaneously its exact opposite, the narrative of placement. The poet–raconteur is a teller of place and in the telling writes the near into the far, space into place and writes – in anything near decipherable – the centre all over again. How do we account for this discursive nature of the exilic? Exiles are written, they argue, but what of their writing? In this passage by Derrida’s poet-in-residence Jabès, the peculiar position and identity of history’s exile are reaffirmed. Jabès’s wandering Jew, Yukel, is observed by one of his ‘imaginary’ rabbis: Yukel, you have never felt at ease in your skin. You have never been here, but always elsewhere, ahead of yourself or behind like winter in the eyes of autumn or summer in the eyes of spring, in the past or in

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But what exactly is meant by this enigmatic pose? This is the standard reflection on exile – the émigré Jabès offers little other than an exploration of modern consciousness as the expressive condition of the displaced, alienated or marginalized, and so on. Writing in 1964, Derrida muses on this and other passages from Jabès’s nomad texts, allying – in a fashion now familiar – the ‘Poet and the Jew,’ who, he reaffirms, ‘are not born here but elsewhere. They wander, separated from their true birth.’46 The exilic poetics of Jabès turns away from the politics of dislocation and finds refuge – with Derrida – in the space of writing, in a certain poetics of exile which they both argue enacts the experience of homelessness and marginalization from which there is no avenue of escape. The writer is the subject of his own representation but, for Derrida, in the writing he comes asunder – in Derrida’s words: ‘in its representation of itself the subject is shattered and opened ... ruined, made into an abyss, in its own representation’.47 And this is precisely the kind of textuality that Said has in mind – the place of the exile here is more disinfected than disaffected, the latter being the politics on which Said prognosticates. The errant Jew – himself symbolized by the extreme voluntarism of his spiritual father Abraham – would come to symbolize the profound theological and philosophical difference and separation: ‘The first act which made Abraham the progenitor of a nation,’ says Hegel, ‘is a disseverance which snaps the bonds of communal life and love. The entirety of the relationships in which he had hitherto lived with men and nature, these beautiful relationships of his youth, he spurned.’48 Here is the first act of the narrative of exile by way of Abraham, who tore himself free altogether from his family as well, in order to be a wholly self-subsistent, independent man, to be an overlord himself. He did this without being injured or disowned, without the grief which after a wrong or an outrage signifies love’s enduring need, when love, injured indeed but not lost, goes in quest of a new fatherland in order to flourish and enjoy itself there [but] .... [t]he whole world Abraham regarded as simply his opposite; if he did not take it to be a nullity, he looked on it as sustained by the God who was alien to it ... . He was a stranger on earth, a stranger to the soil and to men alike. Among men he always was and remained a foreigner ...49

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the future like those syllables whose passage from night to day is so much like lightning that it merges with the movement of the pen .... You read the future. You give us the future to read. Yet yesterday you were not. And tomorrow, you will no longer be.45

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Reflecting on his separation from God and forced to confront his solitude, the figure of the Jewish nomad came to represent an essential separation and opposition of consciousness to life itself. In reflection is discovered only the impossibility of that reflection ever coinciding with itself and in this division is rendered the only true experience – an extreme example of the spirit of Hegel’s unhappy consciousness. Where, for Hegel, the Greeks found their freedom and self-certitude in a union of self and nature provided by the polis, a rent comes with the melancholy reflection of the Jew, who in his solitude can only remain opposed to the fruits of life and nature. The apparently pathological narrative placement of ‘the Jew’ as the perfect stranger and the essential outsider is attributable as much to the inventions of poetic writing and history as to philosophy. But this narrative placement should not be read simply as relegation. While there is little doubting this positing in Hegel, Jabès seems similarly to wander the speculative and intuitive spaces (Begriff; begriffen) described by the German philosopher: the Jew, says Jabès, ‘is the true stranger because he is himself. Because he wants to be himself. Because he has always tried to be himself .... Even the stranger considers him a stranger. For this reason, he is the stranger of the stranger.’50 And, again, says Derrida of Jabès: ‘The Poet and the Jew are not born here but elsewhere. They wander, separated from their true birth. Autochthons only of speech and writing, of Law.’51 Derrida concurs here with Hegel, affirming that the ‘Jewish consciousness is indeed the unhappy consciousness, and Le livre des questions is its poem ...’52 For the ausländer Jabès, the poet is the subject of a book greater than his own, for ‘the fatherland of the Jews ... [is a] sacred text surrounded by commentaries’.53 Derrida supplements Jabès with a commentary of his own: ‘The necessity of commentary,’ he says, ‘like poetic necessity, is the very form of exiled speech. In the beginning is hermeneutics.’54 In a hermeneutic manoeuvre that is signal in Derrida, he argues here that there are essentially ‘two interpretations of interpretation’: a rabbinical hermeneutic, the search for way back to a central and binding final truth; and a certain poetical hermeneutic, an interpretive play or shift that inheres in the text.55 But what is this dichotomy, especially in the context of an exilic poetics? Derrida is pointing to the structural implications of this play – an interpretive play that hovers about a centre in order to prove that, properly speaking, centre is a sort of Yeatsian ‘turning in the widening gyre’ where things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. But while things may and do certainly fall apart, the metaphysical centre holds; things cannot fall

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Conflation, Contradiction and the Colonized Mind

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apart without it. The notion of centre – the middle term – is necessary for the structure that allows for the possibility of a margin. And Derrida does turn to the centre in his later deconstructive manifesto of 1966 where also is invoked his double hermeneutic: one of these interpretations of interpretation is a sad introspection, sunk in a search for truth and an absent origin, while the other turns away from this search for origins, affirms an interpretive play as part of its endeavour to transcend the limitations of man and his metaphysics.56 Here he argues the centre functions not only as the organizing principle of the structure, but acts as a limit on the play adverted to in his desert hermeneutics.57 While he attributes the alienated former to a negative Rousseauian disposition, he gives the latter an affirmative Nietzschean demeanour ... all free spirits run riot, indeed. But the centre is indeed pivotal to Derrida’s structure and is redolent with the Hegelian force Althusser attributed to him: origin affirmed/denied – circle of becoming that presupposes its end and its beginning, and so on. The centre both limits and allows for the possibility of this structural play, its inner logic, he argues, being contradictorily coherent: it is both inside and out, origin and end in the teleological moves of the dialectic – the centre about which the circle of teleology runs. Here, the structural and positional logic rendering centre – that of its essential and dialectical terms, inside and outside, teleology – points then to that of tenuity and its attendant anxiety, the structural and positional logic, we might say, of the subject (Sachen). But deconstructive play – regardless of its critical worth – has spawned a creche of febrile hermeneuticians, loosed on cultural criticism with a fake licence to trade, uncritically. It has fostered a dazzling ignorance within the wide fields of cultural theory that has, again, given licence to those outside its critical circle to at turns lampoon and lay siege. Its long-held promise of metaphysical rupture is to this day greeted with uproarious hoots and howls of cultural studies glee as its advocates trawl for objects to deconstruct – a word that even in the mouths of its best-schooled advocates rings with a dissonance in critical enterprise. But, like Jabés, rupture could not be further from their minds. Erasure is good, it serves them well but rupture has a connotation that rings like tinnitus in the ear of the marginalist. Kristeva contrived the notion of abjection which she declares as a sort of state of statelessness – neither subject nor object, the abject is that which ‘draws me toward the place where meaning collapses’. Drawing on the (psychopathological) interstices of Hegel’s dialectical becoming in the master–slave relation, Kristeva touches on the ideological kernel

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of displacement: ‘The one by whom the abject exists is thus a deject who places (himself), separates (himself), situates (himself), and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing .... For it is out of such straying on excluded ground that he draws his jouissance. The abject from which he does not cease separating is for him, in short, a land of oblivion that is constantly remembered.’58 But what of Derrida’s Jabès and his land of oblivion? For Derrida, Jabès is a poet of rupture, a poet who doubles and redoubles the centre, mimicking the contradictory coherence of a centre that for him cannot exist and, therefore, his own position in relation to that centre is void. Jabès’s interpretive play is critical for Derrida in its very rupture with the inner logic of the structure – the centre – because this is its only chance. But in this interpretive and disruptive play, the poet is party to another form of play which, it seems, mitigates against the interpretative. It is the game of the cynic. The poet increasingly adverts to another structural logic – ‘unhoused’ and finding himself at the margin, he seems content to play there, unruffled by his lack of cultural, national or existential place. Now this particular play is the sloppiness, the shifting of the various parts of a particular formality that gives rise to the potential for variance in any given direction. It shows the extent to which form can come undone or show signs of wear. The engineer and the mechanic know this phenomenon only too well. They can feel it, measure it, and return it to original form since, as they know full well, ‘[p]lay is always play of absence and presence ...’59 Writing on Jabès’s exilic poetics, Taylor says that exile ‘is not only, indeed is not primarily, a matter of spatial and temporal dislocation ... the topos of exile is writing. Writing at once interrogates and enacts the condition of unbelonging from which there is no escape.’60 Blanchot had similar ideas, aphorizing that ‘whoever writes is exiled from writing, which is the country – his own – where he is not a prophet.’61 Pointing out that ‘[a]ll writing, in fact, involves exile,’ Stamelman cites this passage from Blanchot as testimony to ‘the inescapable estrangement that all language creates’.62 It would seem, however, that Stamelman’s citation is not a means to a particular hermeneutics of estrangement, but its poetic valorization. In fact, Blanchot’s allusion to the impossibility of sovereignty in one’s own country (writing) tells us much more about (the now less than sovereign) Jabès and the predicament of the subject–writer than Stamelman’s poetic valorization will allow. Along with his Jewish compatriots, Jabès was expelled from Egypt after the Suez crisis of 1956 and lived out his life in France. In his relegation he turned more fully to Judaism, coming to the belief that this

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Conflation, Contradiction and the Colonized Mind

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faith was ‘an extended lesson in reading, which involves an endless questioning of the writer’.63 Quoting Adorno’s famous utterance that after Auschwitz we can no longer write poetry, Jabès corrects this to assert that ‘after Auschwitz we must write poetry but with wounded words.’64 This all sounds very familiar – Jabès, Darwish, Habibi – Jew or Arab, the margin is written in their destiny. As if in reply to Jabès and the like, Adorno would later write in a manner disarming even for the most marginal of poets: ‘hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living ... mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared.’65 The writer is the subject of his own representation but in the writing, in the reading, the subject comes asunder as, for Derrida apropos Jabès, ‘in its representation of itself the subject is shattered and opened ... ruined, made into an abyss, in its own representation.’66 Where the reflexive self comes to simultaneously desire and disavow the very personal difference with which it is confronted, the reflexive self is as conflationary as it is contradictory, again, in Hegelian terms, its double meaning. But contradiction is masked, effaced in a manner that reduces to surface and, while this is central to all subjectivity, the affectivity attendant to the marginalist makes the situation more difficult to discern, particularly for the marginalist himself. The moral dilemmas attached to minoritarian situations and causes, their real marginal subjects and the abundance of sound critical theory available to a reading of the marginalist disposition have the tendency to fuel a progressive denegation of the undulations external not only to them, in the real world, but to their own peculiar affective proclivities.

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5 The Realm of Possible Positions

So, after some peregrination, we have entertained self-consciousness, passed into the native land of truth, into that kingdom where it is at home and found it wanting. As self-consciousness needed to achieve a knowledge of self, it purged itself of the knowledge of its other which preceded it but which now, preserved in the sublationary moves of the subjective moment, lurks as mere moments of self-consciousness, ‘as abstractions of differences, which are, at the same time, of no account ... and are purely vanishing entities (Wesen)’1 – that inward shudder of character. The subject has come to posit itself; through parlous mediation between an identity and its negative term (non-identity), it has produced itself, its own becoming. The negative term, however, must not now be written off in the process of teleology, it remains on the Hegelian field as one of his toughest players: ‘[T]he life of mind is not one that shuns death, and keeps clear of destruction; it endures death and in death maintains its being,’ writes Hegel. ‘It only wins to its truth when it finds itself utterly torn asunder .... looking the negative in the face, and dwelling with it. This dwelling beside it is the magic power that converts the negative into being.’2 In his well-known analysis of textual pleasure Roland Barthes posed a question of significance not simply for the cultural studies he so seriously influenced, but for a political, symptomatic reading that is just as valid for the consumer market: ‘Is not the most erotic portion of the body where the garment gapes?’3 He finds here a sort of physics of bliss, bringing to the surface the very contradictions and fissures that render surface. While the surface denies and seemingly effaces difference it is nonetheless varied and ideological – all the logical small change is in the interstices, he rightly avers. The text here offers a seemingly reliable map to its terrain. But, as he discusses his own pleasure in reading Sade, 115

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The Curious Heimat: Fetishism, Rupture, Boundary

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we get a measure of the meaning of perversity. He describes how his reading pleasure emerges from certain breaks and collisions: ‘antipathetic codes (the noble and the trivial, for example) that come into contact,’ effecting a certain severance or cutting, in which ‘[t]wo edges are created: an obedient, conformist plagiarizing edge ... and another edge, mobile, blank (ready to assume any contours) which is never anything but the site of its effect: the place where the death of language is glimpsed’.4 Death of language or subjective negative term, Barthes has, either way, evinced subjectivity’s inherent failure and its driving tendency to conflate these two edges which are themselves the symptom of perversion. But the interstitial ruse that draws us to the gaping garment offers something else – it is erotic precisely because the edges do not close on the subject – it is not just the flesh on offer but the intimation that is at the root of the seduction. In this physics what the voyeur–subject wants ‘is the site of a loss, the seam, the cut, the deflation, the dissolve which seizes the subject in the midst of bliss’.5 Here is Hegel’s origin affirmed/ denied – the circle of becoming that is contradictorily coherent ... looking the negative in the face. Barthes here invokes Nietzsche but squares with Hegel – desire as the disclosure of a void, the presence of the negative term in the bosom of the reflexive subject. Even conflation offers up its essential and driving tendencies as the sea eventually gives up its treasure. Lacan was never far from this action either – ever the seeker of the interstices of the subject’s proud plenitude, particularly the perverted plenitude of the voyeur: ‘You grasp here, the ambiguity of what is at issue when we speak of the scopic drive. The gaze is the object lost and suddenly refound in the conflagration of shame, by the introduction of the other. Up to that point what is the subject trying to see? What he is trying to see, make no mistake, is the object as absence. What the voyeur is looking for and finds is merely a shadow, a shadow behind the curtain. There he will phantasize any magic of presence .... What one looks at is what cannot be seen.’6

The logical small change, intimacy’s measure Voyeurism always keeps its subject at a distance from its object. ‘It is no accident,’ says Metz, ‘that the main socially acceptable arts are based on the senses at a distance.’7 But these ‘arts’ need not be socially acceptable and the distance not a matter of scale, of distal measure, but the mere fact of relation – distance is relative, particularly so for the voyeur who,

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by cowardly contrivances, will establish a distance that is comfortable and safe. But voyeurism requires intimacy – albeit a one-sided affair – so, by key-hole or telescope, the distance is measured and coordinated such that optimal intimacy is obtained. This is illustrated to monstrous effect near the end of Pasolini’s film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). As the imprisoned youths are being variously tortured and executed in the infernal Dantesque Circle of Blood – a courtyard resembling that of an old prison – the fascist Masters look on with binoculars, through closed, barred windows, the same point of view we have of the gruesome proceedings. So the fascists are distantiated from images of torture, both by the distance of the room from which they watch to the yard below and, importantly, the focal length of the binoculars – notably, opera glasses. This distance occludes the screams of the victims, enhancing the effect of privacy and potential intimacy for the sadistic voyeur. While one of the Masters closes the voyeuristic distance by reaching behind him and, without taking his eyes of the scene of torture, masturbating one of his young fascist charges, a most salient point here is when another inverts the binoculars, increasing the distance from his object of view ... the senses at a distance. The telos of Barthes’ physics is the interstitial, a certain tendency in the workings of representation toward this sublation of difference and contradiction. While the marginalist, the miscreant, the guilty, the voyeur and the collaborator – the subject – seeks to conflate, to close distance, efface and evade, their contradictory inner logic drives them still to this space in-between, the middle term or tendency of their own reflexive representation. The speculative philosopher and the modernist know the space well and were known to, on occasion, have sought it out. Some would say this was due to an insatiable appetite for an illusive truth, or the hermeneutic lie; that the one who took such a reflective position was purblind to its diminishing returns. Marx gave tendency its currency. It is the workings of the true law of development of capitalist production, that is, of its variation. ‘Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that result from the natural laws of capitalist production,’ says Marx. ‘It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results.’8 Earlier I invoked Said’s articulation of the interdependent territories (of the subaltern and the elite historiographer) and how it pointed to a certain industry of interdependency that perhaps would once have been called either Imperialism or colonialism – that the space of the marginalist and the margin itself was akin to that of the commodity in the

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marketplace which has social antagonisms and tendencies of its own. The margin is nothing if not tendency. Etienne Balibar explores Marx’s trope and defines it as ‘a restriction, a diminution, a postponement or a travesty of effectivity. Tendency is a law “whose absolute action is checked, retarded and weakened, by counteracting causes” ... or even one whose effects are annulled (aufheben) by these opposed causes .... “Thus,” ’ he cites Marx, ‘the law acts only as a tendency. And it is only under certain circumstances and only after long periods that its effects become strikingly pronounced.’9 This law proffers plenitude and surface but Marx glimpsed the system at its edge, defining the law of capitalist development by its very tendency to contradiction and failure. Pointing to the living contradiction in the law of production itself over the more obvious manifestations of social antagonisms, Marx argues that the ‘general and necessary tendencies (Tendenzen) of capital must be distinguished from the forms in which they appear.’10 Tendency is itself contradiction – the structure develops, works dialectically according to these tendencies which, when distinguished from its apparent form, point to the mystificatory mirror of contradiction itself. Contradiction and dichotomy as conflation. But the appearance of these forms is rarely discernible as dialectic; the movement by which Hegel defines this dialectic is synthesized in the manner of Hegel himself – the dialectical overcoming (the Aufhebung) tends to show us form and appearance over the process by which these are achieved or affected. From the law of production to the narrative of production (all narrative is production – the relation is reciprocal) it is this production that works toward plenitude, always against its inherent tendencies to failure and rift, and so the negativity implicit in this dialectical movement is seemingly lost to the system of representation it forges. Marx would look for this lost terrain via an elaborate mapping of the commodity, via a sort of second-order dialectic. ‘To see this invisible, to see these “oversights”, to identify the lacunae in the fullness of this discourse, the blanks in the crowded text, we need something quite different, from an acute or attentive gaze; we need an informed gaze,’ argues Althusser, ‘a new gaze, itself produced by a reflection of the “change of terrain” on the exercise of vision, in which Marx pictures the transformation of the problematic.’11 This second-order dialectic is, for Althusser, akin to Freud’s second discourse of the unconscious, which can only be charted by a Freudian symptomatic reading – a reading for absences or, perhaps, tendencies in the apparent continuity of what is spoken or rendered. In order that the

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lacunae be identified it is necessary that such a reading be taken, ‘to identify behind the spoken words the discourse of the silence, which, emerging in the verbal discourse, induces these blanks in it, blanks which are failures in its rigour, or the outer limits of its effort: its absence, once these limits are reached, but in a space which it has opened’.12 Only by listening for the silences, for what is not spoken as much as what is, can the reader enter the surface reflected in any given text (or subject). This is the surface of the problematic, the underlying structure which allows for certain utterances, the positing of certain questions, while excluding others. Althusser argues that in Capital Marx ‘measures a distance and an internal dislocation (décalage) in the real, inscribed in its structure’, the effects of which are made ‘illegible, and the illusion of an immediate reading of them the ultimate apex of their effects: fetishism’.13 Picking up on a reference by Lacan, that ‘it was none other than Karl Marx who invented the notion of symptom,’ Žižek too recognizes how this discursive move cuts through the reflective closed circuit fetishism of representation (subject) to question not the secret hidden in the form, but the secret of the form itself. Marx’s great achievement was to demonstrate how all phenomena which appear to everyday bourgeois consciousness as simple deviations, contingent deformations and degenerations ... are necessary products of the system itself – the points at which the ‘truth’, the immanent antagonistic character of the system, erupts. To ‘identify with a symptom’ means to recognize in the ‘excesses’, in the disruptions of the ‘normal’ way of things, the key offering us access to its true functioning.14 Bringing out the Marx in Lacan, Žižek here fruitfully develops the hermeneutic relation between Marx and Freud, between their respective analyses of the work of the commodity and the work of the dream – of representation and its subject. ‘In both cases,’ he argues, ‘the point is to avoid the properly fetishistic fascination of the “content” supposedly hidden behind the form (the form of commodities, the form of dreams) but, on the contrary, the “secret” of the form itself.’15 And this is a very good point. The real work is not to penetrate the manifest discourse of the form to reach some concealed meaning but to look to the very system that produced the form and the tendencies implicit in it. For Althusser, the representative form is the effect of a Scriptural pact between Logos and Being, a pact that needs to be broken such that ‘a new conception of discourse at last becomes possible .... we must,’ he argues, ‘completely

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reorganize the idea we have of knowledge, we must abandon the mirror myths of immediate vision and reading, and conceive knowledge as a production.’16 Classical political economy, adverts Žižek, had hit upon the secret of the commodity form (‘the “secret of the magnitude of value” ’) but remained sunk in the problematic of the fetishism of the commodity and continued to fetishize the contents of concealment – and so ‘what is not yet explained is simply its form, the process by means of which the hidden meaning disguised itself in such a form.’17 There are two key points here to be made in relation to the marginalist enterprise, especially its appeal to counterhegemonic practice and marginal repatriation. First and most obvious, they should logically be recognized as self-conscious subjects who, like the rest of us, are found wanting – the reflexive turn is a difficult one and promises little. But a second, critical aspect is that these are not the working stiffs of the commodified world; they are avowedly critics, replete with critical faculties (institutional support, research grants, etc.) and intellectual aspirations, all necessary to their enterprise which sets its sights on an outside world and purports to act on it. Appropriating Hegel, Marx articulated such an enterprise in Capital: ‘By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway.’18 And this is Hegel’s self-consciousness now set free, precisely because of this action and change. As Marx famously averred, in his eleventh and final thesis on Feuerbach: ‘Philosophers have merely interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’19 And there’s the rub. The anti-identitarian pledge in the marginalist is equal to the counterhegemonic and both are necessarily well-known and embraced terms within the marginalist lexicon: their disguised theoretical armoury. But the very theoretical application required to critique their world (their world view) and the human sensuous activity that inhabits it are located within the very metanarratives they must eschew. Riven by Hegelian negativity, the self-consciousness of marginalism sets about stitching itself up, composing itself as pure subjectivity, pure form, disavowing the negative at all costs. A certain fantasy of rupture inheres, but the void through which it might realize itself is sealed. The negative term (suitably, the non-identical, Differenz) is now displaced to the marginal – a perverted and fantastic projection of marginalist identity in the distorted visage of the subaltern. They are indeed self-conscious, embarrassed as only a marginalist can be.20 This is of course the extreme perversity of the politics of identity: founded on an anti-identitarian logic, the identity in question becomes,

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in fact, a figure of reversal in which the apparent difference on which it is based serves only to compound the identitarianism represented in a range of subjective fundamentalisms, be they race, gender, sexuality, or extreme otherness. Said had something of this on his mind when (late in his career, it must be said) he wrote: ‘Identity as such is about as boring a subject as one can imagine. Nothing seems less interesting,’ he continued, ‘than the narcissistic self-study that today passes in many places for identity politics, or ethnic studies, or affirmations of roots, cultural pride, drum-beating nationalism and so on.’ While he argued there was a critical responsibility ‘to defend peoples and identities threatened with extinction or subordinated because they are considered inferior, but that is very different from aggrandizing a past invented for present reasons’.21 The subject’s critique is lost to the simplistic mimetic lures of reflection and identification, and the necessary critique of the world in which it lives or subsists (the socioeconomic and structural problematic) becomes mere abstraction. But significantly, again, this is contradiction masked by conflation – as, again, distance closes on difference to confer on identity the traumatic negative term of the us in them and the them in us.

Everyone’s lookin’ for strange Mike Figgis’s film Internal Affairs (1990) was on to something here. Pitting a smart but conservative cop from internal affairs against a streetwise and corrupt one (an old chestnut), Figgis focuses beyond the reflexive foreground of the protagonists’ narcissistic relation and looks to a relative distance between them. At one point, the dark side of this male equation, Dennis Peck (Richard Gere), intimates he will be bedding the wife of his assailant Ray Avila (Andy Garcia), that, in fact, she might secretly desire his rat cunning and street-smart ways. Avila riles, threatening Peck. Still with the upper hand, safe in his familiar terrain, Peck leans into Avila and quietly and sardonically suggests to his nemesis something of the human condition: ‘Everyone’s lookin’ for strange, Raymond.’ Figgis here is pointing precisely to this contradictory coherence that is at the core of the subject, its tendency masked in the ideological gloss of its representation, both to itself (ideology) and the outside world – fantasy looking for an out. The Althusserian project set out to describe a system of social relations that act functionally and structurally on subjects in a manner that both posits and escapes them, that has little to do with conscious apprehension. The lived relations of ideology are, again, the overdetermined unity

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of the real and imaginary relations between the subject and their real conditions of existence and, while emergent from internal and external contradiction, these are conflated and unconscious. While the fall-back position of consciousness is true of Hegel, we can see in his project the struggle implicated in what Ricoeur called the unreflected – the unconscious that is, at base, the true work of the human lived relation in a reflexive and essentially oppositional moment. But, while representation serves to mask contradiction, the reflexive subject has not always been so blind to its contrivances, or craven in the face of the system that seeks to annul them. Positions were taken and the representational screen of ideology was up for grabs – the very positioning of the subject in the system of representations was precisely the stuff of critical inquiry. Conflation was the work of the marketplace; its surfaces everywhere began to come under attack, as did its identitarian subject. ‘Contradiction,’ argued Adorno, ‘is nonidentity under the aspect of identity; the dialectical primacy of the principle of contradiction makes the thought of unity the measure of heterogeneity.’22 It is no coincidence that many of the last century’s heralds of heterogeneity worked within the fields of the representative and performative arts – theatre, cinema, as well as the incisive moments of literature and theory – and set about seeking the contradictory fissures in representation and the process by means of which these were disguised in the representative form. Where representation was a projection of the mimetic play so central to the formation of the subject, the performative too was a central moment in the subjective process. Bertolt Brecht fuelled his epic theatre with the spaces between frames of flickering film and its distractions, the tendencies inherent in this particular representative form, were in common with those of its viewing subject. It ‘proceeds in fits and starts ...’ wrote Benjamin on Brecht’s theatre, ‘Its basic form is that of the forceful impact on one another of separate, sharply distinct situations in the play ... As a result, intervals occur which tend to destroy illusion.’23 Benjamin’s filmic allusion is more than mere metaphor. When Brecht took in the sights of the Soviet Union in 1935, the Soviet film monteurs (Eisenstein, Kuleshov, Pudovkin) were as much on his mind as its dramaturges, writers and poets (Tretyakov, Mayakovsky, Shklovsky, Meyerhold). Here he was introduced to Shklovsky’s dramatic concept of the device of making strange (pryom ostranneniya), of presenting the received, normative world in a new, strange or unsettling context.24 In contriving such a device these artists and critics were already on to the fact that, indeed, everyone was already lookin’ for strange ...

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For Eisenstein, the dialectical effect of montage was to bring the field of representation and its viewing subject asunder. By means of the cutting and collation of a collision of shots, and between them a variety of shocks (radical cuts), was born the cell of montage. This created a field of conflict within the representative field precisely as a device of making strange: ‘Conflict within the shot is potential montage,’ wrote Eisteinian, adding that ‘in the development of its intensity shattering the quadrilateral cage of the shot and exploding its conflict into montage impulses between the montage pieces. As, in a zig-zag of mimicry, the mise-enscène splashes out into a spatial zig-zag with the same shattering.’25 This dialectical notion of filmic montage in Eisteinian was to have arguably the most enduring effect on his performative art. Brecht’s Verfremdungs-effekt was the problematic of his epic theatre as much as it is a troubling tool of representation and a stage door to the ideological lives we lead under its repressive operations. In something of a staged representation of Hegel’s negation of the negation, Brecht’s V-effekt became the alienation of alienation.26 In Eisenstein, the dialectical shock was similarly the delivery of the negative term by means of the unfurling of a concept by the collision of independent and often seemingly contradictory shots. Its new dialectical form was arguably the first real assault on the conflationary role of representation. According to Müller, Shklovsky said that in Eisenstein’s October (1928) ‘the end of the commodity world becomes image.’27 The reflective façade of representation and its corollary, commodification, are exposed as mere form. Brecht became something of a poster boy for not only agitprop theatre but a serious, intellectual endeavour in the modernist approach to representation and the conditions of production. As Benjamin had it, representation and the conditions of its production themselves needed to be represented; ‘the first point at issue is to uncover those conditions. (One could just as well say: to make them strange [verfremden].) The uncovering (making strange, or alienating) of conditions is brought about by processes being interrupted ... Suddenly a stranger comes into the room.’28 In Left modernist polemics, representation and (material) production were interchangeable as forces and instruments of repression. It was here that the counterhegemonic enterprise would take its most critical turn, impacting in equal measure the realms of theory and practice, which are still in evidence today. This theory–praxis nexus here shows us a critical juncture in the criticism of subjectivity and representation – doubtless the modernist enterprise – but it also shows us the subjectively marginal and the means

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by which it is effected. This logical small change of subjectivity is both the stuff of the marginalist – turned out in the form of identity and its paradoxically normative politics – and its symptom. The slight levelled at modernism that its quest was theoretically impoverished, if not entirely blind to the real of representation, serves the marginalist enterprise most forcefully. Postmodernism’s embrace of difference is a sophisticated theoretical lie – a ruse that allows for the the disavowal of the symptom of the representative subject – the celebration of the particular over and against the universal is merely a sop to difference and, at that, a difference the postmodernist need never entertain. The denial of the tendency carried at the level of the interstitial, by definition a phenomenon of the surface, is the denial of reflexivity which, ipso facto, refuses the possibility of a marginalism. Strange proof of the circularity of teleology.

The imaginary geography of the marginalist I started this work on marginalism with barely a mention of Orientalism and its postcolonial bearer except to place it in the pantheon of a wider minoritarianism; in a sense, to set the scene. Orientalist criticism – the object of which is Orientalism itself – is by now a well-established orthodoxy, well-articulated and now spawning variants in other putatively exoticized regionalisms (viz. balkanism) as formerly unknown, ignored or disguised regions come into view and become apparent fair game for the Imperium of the voyeur. Colonialism (as described by Said in the form of the great Imperium of the West) was near to finished by the time his book first appeared in 1978, but the portentous (if simply timely) nature of this volume was evident to almost all who picked it up. It popularity, to this day, is undiminished and it will likely remain a significant historical document. But, as Said points out, Orientalism began as a legitimate academic discipline. He traces it from its origins in medieval church edicts, which were essentially inclusionary in nature, to its advancement in studious endeavour through to the early twentieth century. The discipline had a wide philological and ethnographic reach in its inclusiveness, its documentation extensive, robust and earnest in nature. Indeed, ‘by the middle of the nineteenth century,’ writes Said, ‘Orientalism was as vast a treasure-house of learning as one could imagine.’29 So what changed? What turned a legitimate field of academic endeavour into a now sweeping ethnic, religious and cultural slight? While a Germanist or Asianist today, for example, is considered still a legitimate scholar and expert in

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their field, the Orientalist is a voyeur, a fetishist with an eye on colonization, whether actual or metaphorical. As Lockman points out, ‘not everyone accepted the critique of Orientalism. A good many scholars of Islam or the Middle East rejected it outright and lamented the fact that “Orientalist” had come to be widely used in a pejorative sense.’30 Said suggested the tendency to fetishize an imaginary geography was always implicit, that its inclusiveness was merely symptomatic of a desire to advance on this treasure-house more fully. His acceptance of the relatively benign nature of area studies is that, in contrast to Orientalism, they are localized, specific in nature. It was the totalizing and expanding nature of Orientalism that was, for him, suspicious. Its apparent grandiloquence – by dint of its inclusionary and sweeping nature, taking in the sights, cultures and languages of both the Near East and the Far East, from Arabic, Indian, Hebrew to Chinese and even Javanese – clearly posited the Orient as the West’s other term. He argues that the term depicted as a field of study is ‘fairly revealing since no one is likely to imagine a field symmetrical to it called Occidentalism’.31 His argument is that the sheer scope of the Orientalist enterprise, combined with the powerful machinery of the modern European state, turned inclusiveness into a sort of expansionism, a colonization, such that its epistemological premise was tarnished and turned to the kind of ‘violence’ suggested by Foucault and Spivak, epistemic, ontological and otherwise. Further, a field of study, he argues, is by definition delimited, and the field of Orientalism came to be something of a closed theatrical stage upon which Europe contained its representations of the Orient. To keep it close, as one keeps an enemy, more than a friend. And, doubtless, this insight is an accurate one. Despite or because of its inclusion in the European expansion of knowledge, Islam embarked on a rabid expansionism of its own, advancing on and occupying vast tracts of Europe’s former empires for the best part of a millennium. ‘Not for nothing did Islam come to symbolize terror, devastation, the demonic, hordes of hated barbarians,’ Said concedes. ‘For Europe, Islam is a lasting trauma.’32 As a certain Islamism revivified some of these historical traits to Europe’s progeny in the United States on 11 September 2001, that trauma is no longer for Europe alone. The term trauma is not lost on Said – the aetiology of neurosis and the hysterical symptom itself, the lasting trauma of the West, implies a reaction, an abreaction as Freud would have had it, a cathectic outpouring aimed at liberation from the damaging effect of this traumatic event. He has written the prognosis for the West’s ongoing relations with Islam and it is not salutary. In alloying the old academic discipline

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with Western imperial ambition, he acknowledges his mobilization of Foucault’s notions of discourse and power. Said himself ushered the negativity that stalks this term Orientalism into the Academy such that is now, in fact, axiomatically an artefact of the expansionist, the colonialist – the hegemon, pure and simple. It’s easy to see how Foucault’s presence as a prominent member of the French intellectual élite influenced not only Said’s work, especially Orientalism, but a generation of students of theory and of the new marginalism in particular. Orientalism is now fundamentally at odds with Orientalist criticism, which, by extension, is imbricated widely in fields of study within the Humanities such as postcolonialism, poststructuralism and cultural studies. Its place in the new marginalism or, perhaps more appropriately, the place for the new marginalism within it is secure. There was and remains for Said’s text, however, a tendency to misreading – particularly as it squarely entered the protocol of theoretical entanglement called cultural studies – that has led not only to theoretical confusion over its aims but to the very baleful marginalism I have outlined. Further, it throws into question all epistemological enterprise – all learning becomes, by definition, expansionist. It is only logical that Orientalism shares much with other academic aims, and it stands to this reasoning that within all Humanities lurks the pathology of the fetishist, the voyeur. Orientalist criticism, in its rush to buy into Said, in fact bought right into Orientalism itself, another rationale to explore the oriental (Islamic) other and colonize all over again. This time, the West came to the East not, apparently, in the interest of conquest, but to serve the very perverse and fetishized interest Said had described. Another figure of reversal. Said argues that Orientalism has the power of a sort of radical realism that poses and fixes its subject somewhere between the near and the far, between other and same. Where the rationalism at the root of the Orientalist discourse Said so well defines points us in the direction of placement and location, of a certain bringing near – his Orientalist theatre – so too, perversely, does its new marginalist child. As the Second World came to a crashing end, critics both Left and Right were quick to spit on its grave. Some nostalgia was evident and is still today, both within and without this region, itself becoming a good earner for venal oligarchs and street-smart entrepreneurs in the former Soviet Union and its Eastern satellites as Westerners clamour for a piece of the action in natural resources and even for their little piece of militaria, fallen statue or wall. As it split it off into the First and the Third, the action almost universally attributed to the salutary (apparently) impact

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of globalizing capital and democracy, the Second World was sublated into the First, the Third left, as usual, for dead or at best the First World’s negative term. So the Second World remains, its symptom perhaps the nostalgia that lurks within. This is Europe’s ghost – the trauma that has effected the Balkanism that now meets its ethnic similars in the Orient. Orientalism was indeed at its peak in the Balkan wars when the putatively secular Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina were besieged by Serbs. The West (intellectuals and tabloid media alike) dressed its fascination as anti-Orientalism in their eagerness to describe the Bosniaks as like us and, therefore, cast the Serbs as the alien them in us – a situation aided by the fact that ethnic Serbs indeed lived among the Bosnians. The sad pathology of Godard’s Our Music. But Balkanism remains as even its own former nationals add to the fetishized view, especially of its southeastern climes, a place (according to some) of ghouls and villains.33 Orientalism was not required for the West to advance across eastern frontiers; it was a by-product of such expansion. Modernity and military advances were given more than a passing glance by ‘Muslim merchants, ambassadors, thinkers, statesmen and, above all, generals whose armies were defeated throughout the nineteenth century in various encounters with their Western counterparts,’ argues Nafissi, pointing out further that the ‘more far-sighted among these, including many religious leaders, became “modernizers” determined to emulate Western institutions, precisely in order to increase the power of the Ottoman or Persian states and avoid further humiliation and subordination.’34 But by the early twenties modernity had caught up with the Middle East, the Ottoman empire no more, having been loosed of its suzerainty over Arab territories from without (taken by its Western enemies) and rid of its Caliphate and Sultanate from within by the secular modernist Ataturk. As Burke puts it, ‘In a little over thirty years, the Middle East came to modern politics,’ though the more appropriate reading might be that modern politics it was brought to it. He adds the not insignificant part played by the Bolshevik Revolution, that it ‘set off deep reverberations throughout the region. For the next fifty years Middle Eastern politics was largely contained within the homogenizing discourse of nationalism.’35 Given the considerable number of ethnic Muslims now under its Union or at its borders, the issue of Islam was an ever prominent one for the Soviet Union that would, arguably, play a part in its eventual collapse. Nafissi points out, according to World Bank figures, that in the decade and a half from 1980 ‘the Middle East and North Africa as a region registered the steepest decline in GNP per capita in the world.’

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Further, a decade ago ‘none of the forty-six member states of the Islamic Conference Organization qualify as fully democratic in the conventional sense of the term’.36 Were it not for their resource richness (oil) and the unique power and extensive wealth of a few despots and oligarchs, these would be failed states. He goes on to argue that these parlous states suited the Orientalist well, confirming a morally bankrupt and modernity-resisting Islam and all that went with it. Orientalist critics, on the other hand, pointed to a more economic and political bankruptcy propagated by colonialism and, worse, neocolonialism. But the Islamist, he argues, invokes both arguments, at once externalizing the causes (attributing them to the various colonizations) and laying claim to Islam as timeless and homogeneous with attendant mass appeal. This is the counterbalance suggested earlier by Said and explains its continued opposition to the West, and its westernized élites within its embrace. As Orientalism was in decline, Islamism was forging ahead with a perfectly acceptable world challenge to modernity and Western decadence.37 Islamism is not caught up in self-conscious concerns of the Western liberal intellectual for whom Orientalism is an offensive term. Stephen Gaghan’s 2005 film Syriana, too, invokes both arguments in what amounts to a sweet dream of Orientalism and, of course, the Orientalist critic. It lays the blame for the corruption and power related to oil and exploitation in the Middle East squarely at the feet of Western imperialism, most notably the United States, pointing blatantly to its internal moral and political corruption as well as the expansionist fantasies of its own oligarchy. It is emblematic of the root cause analysis of radical Islamism that now passes as standard critical fare in liberal circles after the events of 11 September and other terrorist insults leading up to it, such as the depiction here of a very similar suicide bombing to that of the USS Cole in Yemen just one year before (the latter representative of the former). Suitably layered, the narrative is replete with corrupt American oil executives, CIA attempts at assassination of a newly emergent and modernist Arab leader, Prince Nazir (Alexander Siddig), and friendly meddling by an idealistic young energy analyst Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon). While Woodman is touting business for his company, one of his children is accidentally electrocuted while swimming at a pool party at Nazir’s property in Spain. Some time has passed and Woodman, after several attempted approaches, has agreed to meet Nazir, who is guiltridden at the loss of Woodman’s son. While at his desert compound, Nazir points out what Woodman’s company could reap were they to

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take on a major oil contract in his country, in addition to which he wants to hire him as his economic adviser. An obvious sop that adds to Woodman’s evident resentment. He accepts, nonetheless. Woodman sees real modern promise in the young Prince, who wants to drag his nameless emirate into modernity but laments the hold the United States has over his father. A nefarious brother and cabal of parasitic cousins want the status quo, as they serve to reap the benefits of the deals being brokered by numerous American lawyers, and there is the subtle suggestion that they want their progressive relation out of the way. As the contradictions and mendacity of corruption swirl about both the narrative and its paradigm of an Islamic state in the throes of modernization, the Orientalist critique is transparent in its failure. There is a discussion between Woodman and Nazir that gives something more of the two-edged sword of corruption in the region. As they look on a party of these movers and shakers in a corner of their hotel suite, Nazir asks Woodman what he thinks is on the minds of this multinational, entrepreneurial coterie. Woodman advises Nazir they know only too well time is not on their side, that oil is running out and most of what’s left is in the hands of the Middle East. He spells out the realpolitik of oil, from Versailles through the Suez crisis to the Gulf Wars, telling him plainly that what’s in store is a ‘fight to the death’. Woodman is blunt, telling the young emir the American lawyers are circling, hoping their Arab counterparts will keep playing with their wealth and refuse to invest in their infrastructure or economy, and when the party’s over, he counsels his new boss, they will have drained his nation of every drop of its wealth. Of course, both arguments are invoked and endings are neither happy nor salutary. The corrupt get what they want, imperialism serves two masters (one from each side) and the repressed Pakistani guest workers, another narrative layer to this film, are moved to martyrdom. As Nafissi had it, hegemonic Islamism revolved around its need for applied Islamic practices based on Shari’a, a control base for transnational idiomatic practices that would set an agenda for wide, popular support. Opposition to and disposal of the signs of Western imperialism and corruption would assist Islamism in defining an enduring enemy in the West.38 But Nafissi saw too that this would prove its inherent failure. As Shari’a is, he argues, to varying degrees, distilled in every Muslim state in the world, this might prove a tough nut to crack. It is proudly and self-assuredly Islam – for the Islamist, Islam (to turn a little on Said) is in the is. The Islamic revolution in Iran of 1978–1979 had a profound impact, at a critical point in modern politics, among the Muslim world,

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argues Burke. ‘By the early 1980s, most states in the region found themselves challenged by opposition groups that explicitly presented themselves as inspired by Islam.’39 While he cautions against an easy adoption of the proposition that Iran’s successful Islamist revolution saw the emergence of a highly overdetermined Islamist politics, he does point to the failure of secular nationalist interests – Left/progressive forces – to assert themselves in the mid-1970s in Lebanon and Afghanistan and the ‘new power of religion as a badge of communal identity and a symbolic counter in political struggles’.40 Neither the Left nor the Right had predicted the swift deposal of the Shah and the accession to power of the Ayatollah Khomeini, even though the latter had been courted continuously by a sympathetic Left and international press in his short stay in France in 1978. Coverage of the uprisings in Iran were given prominent airing in the Western media that year. However, one Western figure seemed prominent – Foucault had been holding court with various Iranian exiles since the early seventies and visited the country during the height of its upheaval. He was commissioned by the Italian newspaper Corriere delle Sera to dispatch on the events. These visits became notorious, if not simply suspect, even among the radicals of the time. In a meeting with Iranian writer Baqir Parham, Foucault explained his fascination with the Islamist revolution, pointing out that there were really only two momentous upheavals in Europe and the West in the last two hundred years: the liberal revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, essentially instigated by the Enlightenment, but which brought only the calamity of modern capitalism, ‘the harshest, most savage, most selfish, most dishonest, oppressive society one could possibly imagine’. The second was totalitarian communism in the twentieth century, a monstrosity to which, he argued, intellec tuals in their naïveté had contributed by their writings and intellectual support. He was in Iran, he said, because all intellectual approaches to culture and society had hitherto not only failed but systematized the oppression of the very subjects that bore them. The approach had to be rethought, and Iran offered new hope.41 He was roundly criticized for his adventures in Iran and defended his position with an evasive flair, but recanted his affections for Islamism after the mullahs began to take the reins and put Iran’s dissidents to the wall. Still, a certain associative stink followed him to his grave. That a theoretician seeks inspiration in foreign political experiments is neither unusual nor unforgivable. There is a strong tradition, famously studied and utilized by critics of a different political persuasion as proof of not

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only the folly of such excursions, but their inherent sign of failure in the political or theoretical position of their authors. Foucault was not alone.42 Amis points out that the totalist nature of Islamism is reflected in its stout self-sufficiency or extreme incuriosity but, he argues, five years after the World Trade Center onslaught in September 2001 (he’s writing in 2006) ‘what we have been witnessing, apart from a moral slump or bust, is a death agony: the death agony of imperial Islam. Islamism is the last wave – the last convulsion.’43 This is something akin to Said’s trauma for Europe after Orientalism but now the shoe seems to be on the other foot, the abreaction to Islam’s own trauma incarnated in the virulent outpourings of Islamist groups like al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, Jemaah Islamiyah, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas, and certain abreactive enunciations from the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the current President of Iran, a modern, powerful state. Amis says he took comfort in the virulence of Islamism, a virulence that deformed the movement such that it would not hold out for long; its death agony coupled with its unwaveringly negative stance towards the West and its modern profferings would see to that. But, with the West’s war on terror and, especially, the taking of Iraq, this virulence can only continue. Democracy is plainly unsustainable as, he argues, the people will simply vote against it – ‘democracy will be little more than a gangplank to theocracy,’ he cites Sam Harris. In fact, regionwide polls held during 2006 proved a major success for the cause, seeing Islamist gains almost universally. The point of all of this is not to reinvent Orientalism or its critical discourse but to attempt an articulation of the impact of this Islamist thrust as a counter-incursion to Orientalism, as much now as when the Moors and the Ottomans set up house on European soil. As Huntington rightly observed of the relationship between Islam and the West, ‘Each has been the other’s Other’44 – much the same may now be said about their theorization. Where Huntington developed his thesis of an immutable clash of civilizations as early as 1993, when it was ridiculed as much as it was lauded, its easy ‘vindication’ in 11 September 2001 has spawned an entire industry of counter-theory. Huntington’s universalizing and inflammatory rhetoric has met with a rhetoric of qualification in which his arguments are not so much rejected out of hand, as modified, remodelled to accommodate a less culturally adversarial view – that is, one in which negative epithets may still be ascribed but with less apocalyptic and culturally alienating resonance. This is comforting to the marginalist. Tariq Ali’s The Clash of Fundamentalisms45 and Gilbert Achcar’s

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The Clash of Barbarisms46 are two obvious works among this countertextualization of the clashes ‘post-9/11’ that aim to put Huntington and the United States back in their box, to set the record straight by arguing that the clash is not essentially civilizational (a strangely universalizing and inclusionary term) but symptomatic of various fundamentalist cultural tendencies in both the East and the West. These tomes make plain their disdain for US imperialism – and with an interested vitriol and spleen more than equal to their counterparts on the neoconservative Right – and proffer it as the root causes in Islamist terrorism. Their apologistic rhetoric, however, harbours a reluctant concession to the fact there that there are indeed ‘victims and criminal on both sides’.47 Middle East scholar Fred Halliday, on the other hand, points to a certain Left liberal trend to court Islamism, much in the vain of Foucault, in Iran. Halliday describes an anti-Iraq war protest at which he witnessed the curious symmetry of a Basque protestor waving a Hezbollah flag – the tip of a much broader phenomenon, he argues. The predominant banner now reads: ‘we are all Hezbollah now’!48 Something akin to de Certeau’s we are all immigrants now ... While such manifestations would be purely symptomatic of the naïve affiliations and identifications of the new marginalism, its playing out in more established quarters of Left politics elevates Orientalism to a perversion, and a dangerous one at that. A minoritarianism without reserve, its marginalist enclave purblind to its own complicity in Islamism dressed as a new and avowedly inclusive political evangelism. It is more than a shared hatred for incumbent political figures – though this doubtless facilitates their cause in some jejune bonhomie with smiling fascists – it is the apogee of a parasitical politics of identity that is the peculiar privilege of a shallow few.

The Mohammedan trauma of Edward W. Said Again, Said points to a radical realism in Orientalism that effects a certain placement and location, of a bringing near that at once foreignizes the foreign while incorporating it ‘schematically on a theatrical stage whose audience, manager, and actors are for Europe, and only for Europe’.49 He is referring here to the figure of Mohammed (Mahomet) as depicted in Dante’s Inferno. This realism historicizes; by means of a tangible narrative of manageable distances the colonizers colonize, discursively. There is little that is, in fact, radical about it. It is realism, pure and simple. And this, of course, goes for colonizers both East and West – Dante is in

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good international company and here is history’s textual premise, the discursive ground on which its narratives advance. ‘Hence the vacillation between the familiar and the alien,’ argues Said, Mohammed forever cast as an ‘imposter’ because he is both familiar (rather like Jesus) and alien (Oriental) because while he might well be like Jesus, he is not. ‘The figures of speech associated with the Orient,’ he argues, ‘are all declarative and self-evident; the tense they employ is the timeless eternal; they convey an impression of repetition and strength; they are always symmetrical to,’ he continues, ‘and yet diametrically inferior to, a European equivalent ... For all these functions it is frequently enough to use the simple copula is. Thus Mohammed is an imposter ... No background need be given; the evidence necessary to convict Mohammed is contained in the “is”.’50 Said’s disavowal of simple geopolitical, religious and ideological difference – even at the time of Dante – here is both palpable and disingenuous. In the midst of Dante’s ‘circles’, Mohammed can be nothing other than a Sower of Discord and foreignness, a view prevailing at the time of Dante. ‘All these whom thou holdest in the pit/Were sowers of scandal, sowers of schism abroad/While yet they lived; therefore they now go split.’51 And while Said’s narratological premise may well hold true, the alien status attributed to Mohammed and his cousin and son-in-law Ali the chosen Caliph (and sower of schism within his ownfaith) holds no burden of proof; indeed, no background need be given. This status is – especially in the concentric circles of Dante’s infernal cosmos – self-evident ... This proposition has been turned upside-down by the current generation of cultural critics who eschew any such declarative statement, especially about the Orient, especially since the US-led ‘war on terror’, about the Middle East. Since the modern sowers of discord unleashed their fedayin onto the West and its subjects, marginalism worldwide has set an agenda of root cause exculpation, casting the United States as the modern Dante, bin Laden the slighted Mohammed and, just maybe, al-Zarqawi as Ali. Something of this had already begun with the emergence of Imperial Israel and the displacement of the Palestinians, but nothing like the current fervour around West meets East, where Western liberals act in the manner of what certain Jews might call self-hating Westerners. Bhabha is critical of Said’s dichotomization, of the proposed near and far, the foreign and the familiar that set up his critique. He argues that this fails to adequately address issues of alterity and ambivalence that inhere. He does, however, find in his dream-work analogy and its new median category not only a quality analogous to Freud’s fetishism, but a

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means of containing what would otherwise have been a threat to his critique. Of this new median category, he asks: ‘What is this theory of encapsulation or fixation which moves between the recognition of cultural and racial difference and its disavowal, by affixing the unfamiliar to something established, in a form that is repetitious and vacillates between delight and fear?’ Freud’s notion of fetishism and disavowal operates within colonial discursive power, thus necessitating the certain modes of differentiation (sexual, racial), ‘as well as different modes of theoretical discourse – psychoanalytic and historical?’52 Foucault’s lessons served as a proper starting block for Said’s enterprise, he argues, but articulations of discourse and power are simply not adequate to the task. The Freudian machinery of fetishism, however, obtains. But Bhabha unwittingly points out a subtle relation between the discourse of Orientalism and its very criticism, the modes of differentiation implicit in the reveries and actions of Orientalism (imperialism and colonization) coming close to the modes of theoretical discourse that come to reflect on them, dissect and criticize them. Concentrating on the modes of differentiation of Orientalism, Bhabha goes on to express Freud’s notion of fetish as giving ‘access to an “identity” which is predicated as much on mastery and pleasure as it is on anxiety and defense, for it is a multiple and contradictory belief in its recognition of difference and disavowal of it’. He concludes that the scene of fetishism ‘is also the scene of the reactivation and repetition of primal fantasy – the subject’s desire for a pure origin that is always threatened by its division ...’53 Desire for a pure origin that is always threatened by its division ... a telling point for the Orientalist critic indeed. The marginalist here is not immune; the lures of fetishism and the repressed desire to unleash its negative term are ever present, and possibly more so as they are muted by the need to tread carefully on the space of their chosen other. This is the scene of the voyeur, every bit as attributable to the marginalist as to the Orientalist. The pressing need for marginal identification and the inherent sensitivities that determine such an identification, problematize the issue for the marginalist.

The sepulchre of the margins Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (1979) has more than a little to say on the circuit of the margins that mark out such notions such as subjectivity and representation: modernist concerns addressed (arguably here) in a postmodern modality. The Stalker (Aleksandr Kajdanovsky) is an itinerant and diffident guide, a kind of mercenary (no name, no hero,

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not even an anti-hero, barely an agonist) delivering dreamers, opportunists and rationalists alike to the Zone, a forbidden wasteland apparently rendered so by some apocalyptic alien visitation. The Zone confounds description and proves only a sinkhole for reason and logical perspective. At the core of the Zone is the Room, a kind of sepulchral Pascalian sphere – a fearful sphere, whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere – where, it is said, wishes may be granted and dreams realized. On this particular tour of duty, Stalker delivers ‘Writer’ and ‘Professor’ (the designated stand-ins for the apparently adversarial discourses of science and art) to the Zone and its Room. Meeting in a bar before they set out on their journey, Writer and Physicist take stabs at each other’s disciplines: the Writer a somewhat nihilistic cynic, bereft of inspiration, bored with both his craft and life itself; the Physicist giving little away other than his duty to science. Writer to Physicist: ‘Physicist? That’s probably tedious too. Searching for truth. It hides away and you seek it everywhere, to dig it out.’ As they advance on the Zone, the Stalker warns his charges: ‘Straight paths aren’t shortest here, the farther we go the less we risk ... the Zone’s a complex maze of death traps ... demands respect, otherwise it’ll punish you. Former traps disappear, new ones appear. Safe ways become impassable and the way becomes now easy, now confused beyond words. It might seem capricious but at each moment it’s just as if we’ve made it by our own state of mind.’ They advance, toward the Room, throwing large, rusted steel nuts (remnants of earlier productivity, of working life) in their path, tied with white cloth – some clue from Ariadne, some breadcrumbs from Hansel and Gretel – assaying the terrain for traps or lures. They hear voices. They stop to rest, in various states of repose. The Stalker wakes in silent prayer. A long, slow tracking shot picks up his drawn face reflected in a brook beneath the surface of which lies a chalice and piece of sodden scripture (unnoticed, incidental to him though it will become apparent, according to one of his interlocutors, he is a ‘believer in Tsars and Gods: one of God’s fools’), an Orthodox icon, a rusted tin with a syringe, a pistol ... the litter possibly from some earlier sojourn by a soldier, a looter. The Zone is – as near as one can ascertain – a non-space, an inarticulate, ineffable realm that defies interpretation but holds all the signs of metaphysics. It might well be akin to the Lacanian notion of the real (la réel), a place where fantasy and reality converge and which is itself akin to the repressed negative term. It is Percy’s zone with no promises, where his rotation might indeed not transpire. The Lacanian real is the

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elusive kernel of subjectivity: ‘we see here a point that the subject can approach only by dividing himself into a certain number of agencies. One might say what is said of the divided kingdom, that any conception of the unity of the psyche, of the supposed totalizing, synthesizing psyche, ascending towards consciousness, perishes there.’54 And so it is in the Zone. Now this is Lacan’s depiction of all subjectivity and its inherent tendency but it is particularly close to the self-consciousness of the marginalist. Tarkovsky’s Stalker is emblematic of the new merchant of the margins – divided (a trauma closed in its conflationary affect), diffident but mercenary. But the terrain has changed. No longer the heart of darkness depicted by Tarkovsky or Said’s colonizers, the danger inherent in such travails will no longer be brooked by the craven new marginalist. The Room depicted by Tarkovsky, where wishes may be granted and dreams realized, is more likely an internet chat room where anonymity is both safe and isolationist, the latter rationalized as a true (cyber) community. And, while doubtless the power of this tool is both real and effective, it serves a plethora of reasons for the cowardice of such a community. Marc Sageman has argued, in a manner akin to but more sanguine than Amis, that the virulence of Islamist jihad is indeed in its final throes, its zeal self-limiting as its followers, now leaderless, will soon lose heart. Where once young, disaffected Islamic (and some non-Islamic) youth might have had a rallying point at a mosque or local community centre, increased surveillance and security has, in effect, sent them to their rooms. As they can no longer access al-Qaeda’s original leadership, they’ve turned to jihadi Internet forums. But, while they connect via the internet, the rallying cry is somewhat muted, their ‘ad hoc operations do not add up to a coherent political strategy or a coordinated, international grand plan. The network may have evolved since 9/11, but its limitations are clear: the leaderless jihad can only be a terrorist network and nothing more.’ While certain jihadis are held up as heroes, fashion dictates this is ephemeral. ‘If we have the good sense to allow the leaderless jihad to fade away,’ he argues, ‘it should do so in years rather than generations.’55

The new propaganda Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s film Performance (1970) turns on the metaphysical questions that lurk in Tarkovsky’s Zone and Said’s Imperium. The protagonist Chas (James Fox), a stand-over man and loose cannon in the pay of some kind of Kray brothers conflation called,

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appropriately enough, Harry Flowers, finds his fortunes turn when his own boss’s men come gunning for him. He finds himself holed up in a Notting Hill Gate basement flat where Turner (Mick Jagger) and a coterie of nymph-like women live out a reclusive sort of Arcadian existence. Chas poses as a ‘performer’ like his indifferent host, the proselytized Turner, failed rock star turned would-be prophet. Turner begins to pick at the respective edges of himself and Chas, by means of drugs, poetry, myth and music. As Turner decides it’s ‘Time for a change’, Chas begins a reluctant metamorphosis with the aid of slipped drugs and seduction; he is fellated by Turner’s muse Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) as Turner himself mouths an aphorism: ‘Nothing is true, everything is permitted.’ These, according to Turner, are the ‘last words of the Old Man of the Mountain’ – ‘It’s his motto,’ explains Pherber to Chas, as Turner reads of Hassan i Sabbah, and his hashishin who wreaked havoc from their apocryphal garden fortress in Persia. It’s a garden of earthly delights, a sort of purgatorial Paradise for the Old Man’s young recruits who have at their disposal the requisite harem of virgins and the hashish that girds them for their audacious murderous sorties. The paranoid Old Man, according to Turner, would urge his young charges: ‘ “Go thou and kill. And when thou returnest, my Angels shall bear thee into Paradise. And shouldst thou die, nevertheless I will send my Angels to carry thee back into Paradise.” They enjoyed their work.’ Cammell heard of Hassan i Sabbah from William Burroughs’s rendering of the story, in turn told him by his artistic fellow traveller Brion Gysin. While the exact origins of the figure in Burroughs and Gysin are unclear, a certain Orientalism was during this time more than a little fashionable and the story of the Assassins had some currency, especially within intellectual and literary circles. Hassan would become something of a leitmotif in Burroughs’s work, the Persian’s outlaw ways a potent metaphor for his own rational abandon and perverse affectation in literary circles of the day. Turner reads a close approximation of words by Marco Polo, who wrote of the Assassins’ lair at Alamut in his travelogue, The Book of Ser Marco Polo.56 It is now the stuff of legend and more than a little myth. Hassan i Sabbah (or al-Hasan ibn-al-Sabbaˉh) (1090–1124) was something of a radical outlaw and leader of the Ismaili sect of Shi’a Muslims called the Assassins, who holed up in the mountain fortress of Alamut (‘Eagle’s Nest’) in what is present-day Iran. The Assassin movement was the first to systematically use targeted murder as a terrorist political weapon. It called itself the new propaganda and aimed to emancipate its initiates ‘from the trammels of doctrine, enlightened him as to the superfluity of prophets and encouraged him

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to believe in nothing and dare all’.57 As master of the Assassins, this figure appealed to Burroughs – as much as Gysin himself – as a certain figure of rupture who would, in his words, ‘rub out the word forever’.58 While Hassan i Sabbah’s Garden is apparently nihilist, his topos is essentially defensive, a fortified place of retreat where, possessed in contemplation, he merely repeats his own metaphysical rendering. The Old Man attempts an inversion of his own perspective – his retreat is reflected in the outward missions, projections of his assassins, from inside. His assassins’ forays are attacks on his own space reflected; their hostile perspective serves only to reinforce his armour, to reinforce his position. The Old Man of the Mountain is the quintessential marginalist, forged on the fantasy of rupture and alienation; his apocryphal mantra – Nothing is true. Everything is permitted – is given canonical status in pop anarchism and countenanced, tellingly, in postmodern discourse. The new propaganda: the pop prophecy lives in the antiglobalization and counterhegemonic rhetoric of the new marginalism. Their ontology and provenance is shared in the throes of performance, which is itself the frightening work of the subjective negative term – the Garden whose bounds cannot hold. But these words and their nihilistic appeal found their way to modernism through Nietzsche: first in the mouth of Zarathustra’s ‘Shadow’,59 then articulated in more prosaic fashion by the author himself: ‘When the Christian crusaders in the Orient encountered the invincible order of the Assassins, that order of free spirits par excellence, whose lowest ranks followed a rule of obedience the like of which no order of monks ever attained, they obtained in some way or other,’ he continues, ‘a hint concerning that symbol and watchword reserved for the highest ranks alone as their secretum: “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” – Very well, that was freedom of spirit; in that way the faith in truth itself was abrogated.’60 Nietzsche’s Zarathustra too is Persian and founder of a religion which also turns on the notion of truth. Nietzsche asks, since none will ask of him, what the name Zarathustra means in precisely my mouth, in the mouth of the first immoralist: for what constitutes the tremendous uniqueness of that Persian in history is precisely the opposite of this. Zarathustra was the first to see in the struggle between good and evil the actual wheel in the working of things: the translation of morality into the realm of metaphysics, as force, cause, end-in-itself, is his work .... His teaching, and his alone, upholds truthfulness as the

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Where Hassan i Sabbah is holed up in his fortress, descending only vicariously through his assassins to take vengeance on those he believes a threat, Zarathustra goes down into the rabble from his mountain cave to show that, without truth, there is nothing. Where Hassan i Sabbah wreaks vengeance, Zarathustra descends so ‘that man may be freed from the bonds of revenge: that is the bridge to my highest hope and a rainbow after protracted storms’.62 This ‘rainbow after protracted storms’, however, traverses more than the violence implicit in revenge. Nietzsche–Zarathustra actually lifts the veil of metaphysics, and doesn’t like what he sees. Turner puts it to Chas: ‘The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.’ Nietzsche plays at Hegel’s teleology (he disavows it!) and works at the closure of metaphysical promise of the rainbow, putting faith in neither. This is Nietzsche’s symptomatology – to shoot well, to shoot straight with arrows. In so doing he achieved his own madness. This symptomatology can only, in the last instance, point to the workings of subjective closure. It cannot exceed it. The project that seeks its way around the difficult subject of representation, that aims to negate it by expropriating difference, by consuming it in a perversity of identifications, serves only the furtherance of the Imperium: to continue to write the margins in the West ... Under the intoxicating influence of mushrooms and the musicating rhythms of Turner’s tale of the Old Man of the Mountain, Chas begins his ‘turn’, his metaphysical transformation, which is suggestive of his own potential fading (aphanisis) as Pherber fellates him. Job done, she reposes, wiping her mouth, like one of the Old Man’s virgins. She asks of Chas: ‘Are you in that Garden?’ ‘Yeah,’ comes his hazy reply. ‘Stay there!’ Pherber advises: ‘Never trust old men, old showmen, old wankers!’

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supreme virtue .... To tell the truth and to shoot well with arrows: that is Persian virtue. – Have I been understood? The self-overcoming of morality through truthfulness, the self-overcoming of the moralist into his opposite – into me – that is what the name Zarathustra means in my mouth.61

Notes

1. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 283 (my emphasis). Under consideration by Spivak is ‘Intellectuals and Power: a Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze’ in Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 205–17. 2. Ibid., 272, 275. 3. Ibid., 274, 275. 4. Spivak, ‘Explanations and Culture: Marginalism’, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), 107. 5. Spivak, in Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1993), 167 (from an earlier version of this essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice’, Wedge 7/8 [1985]: 121). 6. Sartre, preface to Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (London: Penguin Books, 1967), 8. 7. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, 284. 8. Ibid., 284. 9. ‘If the subaltern can speak then ... the subaltern is not a subaltern anymore’ argued Spivak in defence of her position in writing of the silenced other of India, for her, particularly the low-caste women in a postcolonial India (Spivak, ‘The New Historicism: Political Commitment and the Post-colonial Critic’, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym [London: Routledge, 1990], 158). 10. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1980), 54–5. 11. Sartre in Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 8. 12. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, 281. 13. Young, White Mythologies, 159. 14. Terry Eagleton, ‘In the Gaudy Supermarket’, Rev. of A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, London Review of Books, 21(10) 13 May 1999: 3. As he points out, Spivak rejects much of what passes for postcolonial theory in the US as ‘bogus’ ‘but this gesture,’ he argues, ‘is de rigueur when it comes to one post-colonial critic writing about the rest. Besides, for a “Third World” theorist to break this news to her American colleagues is in one sense deeply unwelcome, and in another sense exactly what they want to hear. Nothing is more voguish in guilt-ridden US academia than to point to the inevitable bad faith of one’s position. It is the nearest a Post-Modernist can come to authenticity’ (ibid., 3). 140

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Introduction

15. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 40. 16. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 149. 17. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 16. While writing here of Kafka and the Jews of Prague under the sway of German language they proceed to say that ‘if the writer is in the margins or completely outside their fragile community, this situation allows the writer all the more the possibility to express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility …’ (ibid., 17). 18. Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex ‘n’ Drugs ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), 186. 19. Michel de Certeau, Culture in the Plural, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). For an exemplary reading of de Certeau’s work on marginality, see also Richard Terdiman, ‘The Marginality of Michel de Certeau’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 100(2) (Spring 2001): 399–421. 20. James Clifford, ‘Diasporas’, Cultural Anthropology 9(3): 302. 21. Ibid., 302. 22. Gregory Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 208. 23. Edward W. Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MT: Harvard University Press, 2000), 176. Adding further to this ‘poetic’ reading, Said also cites Wallace Stevens’s conception of exile as ‘the mind of winter’ (ibid., 186). (A version of this essay was published as ‘The Mind of Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile’, Harper’s Magazine [September 1984]). 24. Ibid., 181. 25. Ibid., 185. 26. P.J. O’Rourke, Give War a Chance (London: Picador, 1993), xviii. 27. David Bordwell and Nöel Carroll, eds. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). While Bordwell and Carroll’s ‘post-theory’ is largely aimed at cinema studies, it has broad implications for other disciplines incorporating ‘Theory’ into their syllabus. In their introduction to this text, Bordwell and Carroll have a good time with essentially French theory, ‘that aggregate of doctrines’ emergent largely from structuralist enterprise such as Althusserian Marxism, Lacanian theory and postmodernism: ‘Here, unabashedly,’ they argue, ‘was Grand Theory – perhaps the first that cinema studies had ever had ... put forth as the indispensable frame of reference for understanding all filmic phenomena ...’ (ibid., xiii). 28. As cited in Geoffrey Hartman, Beyond Formalism: Critical Essays 1958–70 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 101. As Hartman points out, in referring to Achim von Arnim, Breton is adverting to the Romantic origins of a truly ‘subjective’ fiction. There is a particular subjective resonance here for Breton in Arnim’s novella Der tolle Invalide auf dem Fort Ratonneau [The Mad Invalid of Fort Ratonneau] (1818). 29. Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Essential Solitude’, The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, ed. P. Adams Sitney, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, New York: Station Hill Press, 1981), 63, 67.

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Notes 141

Notes

30. Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin, 1991), 58. 31. Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation, 208n9. 32. Walker Percy, ‘The Man on the Train’, The Message in the Bottle (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1981), 83. ‘I hasten to define,’ Percy adds, ‘what I mean by alienation, which has become almost as loose an epithet as existentialism (if you do not agree with me, it is probably because you are alienated)’ (ibid., 83). 33. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 39. 34. Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1979), 15. 35. Peter Fuller, ‘Troubles with British Art Now’, Artforum 15(8) (April 1977): 42–4. 36. Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 25. 37. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 366. 38. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press, 1983), 3. 39. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1979), 46. 40. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1990), 281.

1

First Person Reflection: Origins of the Marginal Disposition

1. Craig Ireland, The Subaltern Appeal to Experience: Self-Identity, Late Modernity, and the Politics of Immediacy (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 4. Ireland’s main bout here is between British culturalist E.P. Thompson and French structuralist Louis Althusser, which, he rightly argues, spawned an entire growth industry – part popular ‘history from below’ (Alltagsgeschichte), part ‘High Theory’ and historiography, it continues today. His articulation of the ‘appeal to experience’ is an erudite piece of cultural critique to which justice cannot be done here. 2. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory in ibid., 7. 3. Ibid., 8. 4. Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms’, in Tony Bennet, Graham Martin, Colin Mercer and Janet Woollacott eds. Culture, Ideology and Social Process (London: Batsford Academic and Educational Ltd, 1981), 25. See also ibid., 8–12. 5. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, assembled Raymond Queneau, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). 6. Aimé Patri, as cited in Editor’s Introduction, ibid., vii. 7. Cornelius Castoriadis, who attributes virtually no influence on the movement by the institutionalized Left, going so far as to say that the latter had already distanced themselves from the student cité years before the tumult began. And here he includes Lacan and Foucault, both of whom ultimately profited from the events as the ersatz counterhegemon (Castoriadis, World

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8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, ed. and trans. David Ames Curtis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 51–2; and Mark Poster, who argues the students ‘rejected the authority of the older intellectuals’ but further quotes Cohn-Bendit: ‘some people have tried to force Marcuse on us as a mentor: that is a joke. None of us have read Marcuse. Some read Marx, of course, perhaps Bakunin and of the moderns, Althusser, Mao, Guevara, Lefebvre. Nearly all the militants ... have read Sartre. But no writer could be regarded as the inspiration of the movement.’ While Althusser gets a guernsey, ‘overall, structuralists maintained silence during May, offering students and workers no support’. Poster concludes: ‘a combination of Sartre’s concept of freedom and Lefebvre’s notion of unalienated festivity best captures the vision of the students’ (Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977], 383–4). Jean-François Lyotard, ‘The dream-work does not think’, The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell, 1992), 31. Vincent B. Leitch, ‘Birmingham Cultural Studies: Popular Arts, Poststructuralism, Radical Critique’, The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 24(1) Cultural Studies and New Historicism (Spring 1991): 74–5. Richard Johnson, ‘What is Cultural Studies Anyway?’, Social Text 16 (Winter 1986–1987): 38. Poster, writing arguably at the zenith of cultural theory, puts de Certeau within the canon of cultural studies, arguing: ‘Of all the important theoretical writings in France in the 1970s and 1980s, Michel de Certeau’s is most germane to cultural studies. Cultural studies may be defined as an interdisciplinary, critical, and historical investigation of aspects of everyday life with a particular emphasis on the problem of resistance – the way individuals and groups practice a strategy of appropriation in response to structures of domination. The work of other theorists does not capture as closely as de Certeau this specific blend of interests that is characteristic of cultural studies’ (Mark Poster, ‘The Question of Agency: Michel de Certeau and the History of Consumerism’, Diacritics 22[2] [Summer 1992]: 94). While Poster’s observation rings true it is noteworthy that de Certeau’s presence was (and is) perhaps most keenly felt within the proudly heterodox circles of cultural studies rather than the other disciplines for which he was also well noted. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Stephen Rendall (Berkley: University of California Press, 1984), xvii, 99. Johnson, ‘What is Cultural Studies Anyway?’, 41. John Barth, Giles Goat Boy or, The Revised New Syllabus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1967), x. Eagleton, After Theory, 29. Edward W. Said, ‘The Politics of Knowledge’, Raritan (Summer 1991): 24, 26. Ibid., 26–7 (my emphasis). Edward W. Said, ‘Secular Criticism’, The World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Vintage, 1991), 3. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 3–4. Bordwell and Carroll, ‘Introduction’, Post-Theory, xiii.

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Notes

22. Bordwell, ‘Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory’ in ibid., 13. 23. Ibid., 10. 24. Bordwell and Carroll, ‘Introduction’, Post-Theory, xv–xvi (my emphasis). 25. Bordwell, ‘Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory’ in ibid., 11. 26. Ireland, The Subaltern Appeal to Experience, 4. 27. Bordwell, ‘Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory’, 3. 28. ‘The critical theory of society also begins with abstract determinations; in dealing with the present era it begins with the characterization of an economy based on exchange’ (Max Horkheimer, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Mathew J. O’Connell and others [New York: Continuum, 1982], 225, 188–243); see also Max Horkheimer, Kritische Theorie: eine Dokumentation, Band I, ed. Alfred Schmidt (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1968), ix. 29. Ibid., 4, 26–30. 30. As cited in The Last Bolshevik, a film by Chris Marker, 1993. 31. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), 251. 32. Said, ‘Secular Criticism’, 4. 33. Young, White Mythologies, vii. 34. Much has been made of the liturgical parrying between these two stars, torn between their apparent anachronism and the values that brought them together as friends, and there’s little doubt Judd’s reflection is gospel: ‘I say to you, this man went down into his house justified rather than the other; because everyone that exalteth himself shall be humbled; and he that humble himself shall be exalted’ (Luke 18: 14). 35. Joan Copjec, Apparatus and Umbra: A Feminist Critique of Film Theory, Doctoral dissertation, New York University, 1986, 48. (Parts of this thesis are transported and reinscribed in her Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists [Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994]). On Bentham’s Panopticon, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991). 36. Ibid., 48. 37. Ibid., 48. 38. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, 290, 291. 39. Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge, 2003), 3. While I will take issue with Adorno’s particular placement of Heidegger, his critique of the defensive/repressive force of philosophical language is potent and germane, and doubly so as it is something from which he himself is not immune. Bachelard, concurring here with Adorno’s petition, refers to Sartre’s superadded lexicon in Being and Nothingness as the ‘geometrical cancerization of the linguistic tissue of contemporary philosophy’ and ‘a dogmatization of philosophemes’ (Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas [Boston: Beacon Press, 1969], 213). 40. Homi Bhabha, ‘The World and the Home’, Social Text 31/32 (1992): 152. 41. Ibid., 141 (my emphasis): ‘The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million – a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather;

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42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

53.

every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need for the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will’ (Henry James, Preface to The Portrait of a Lady in The Portable Henry James [New York: Penguin Books, 2004], 473). Bhabha, ‘The World and the Home’, 141. Ibid., 146. See Freud, ‘The “Uncanny” ’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1971) Volume XVII: 245. Freud, ‘The “Uncanny” ’, 224. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 17, 66, 69. As cited in Gideon Bachman, ‘ “Every Sexual Relationship is Condemned”: An Interview with Bernardo Bertolucci apropos “Last Tango in Paris” ’, Film Quarterly 26(3) (1973): 4. Modernist cinema took to this theme with some enthusiasm, using its formal, visual qualities to great effect. Joseph Losey’s The Servant (1963), Luchino Visconti’s The Conversation Piece (better explained in its original title Gruppo di famiglia in un interno) (1974) and, more recently, Patrice Chéreau’s Intimacy (2001) based on Hanif Kureishi’s collection of short stories of the same name, all explored the theme of intersubjectivity – both defined and contained within ‘four walls’ – and its tendency to division, perversion or rupture. G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J.B. Baillie (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967), 219. Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 140. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), 233. G.W.F. Hegel, The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, trans. H.S. Harris and Walter Cerf (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), 262. As Stephen Houlgate has observed: ‘In general, Nietzsche seems to have relished criticizing great philosophers rather than actually reading them ... The only explicit reference Nietzsche makes to having read any texts by Hegel comes in a letter to Herman Mushacke of 20 September 1865. However, the flippant tone ... does not suggest that he was applying himself very seriously to the study of Hegel: “with coffee I eat a little Hegelian philosophy which spoils my appetite ...” Although of course it is difficult to prove that Nietzsche did not study Hegel in depth, nothing in his work suggests that he accorded more than a cursory attention to Hegel’s texts’ (Stephen Houlgate, Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], 24–5). See also Georges Bataille, who wrote that ‘Nietzsche knew barely more of Hegel than a standard popularization’ (Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988], 109). Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 39. ‘For this is our height and our home: we live too nobly and boldly here for all unclean men and their thirsts’ (ibid., 122). We can perhaps be thankful Zarathustra’s was an apparently voluntary act of a ‘going down’ rather than a ‘falling down’ or ‘downfall’ [Untergang],

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Notes 145

54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61.

62.

2

which might have spelled something more ominous and dramatic for the Hegelians. The former suggests perhaps some notion, at least, in Nietzsche of the Hegelian struggle ... Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 92. Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1996), 217. Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 144, 154. Hegel, The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, 89, 90. The premise is legend and, as here, oft-quoted: ‘Only by forgetting the primitive world of metaphors, only by the congelation and coagulation of an original mass of similes and percepts pouring forth as a fiery liquid out of the primal faculty of human fancy, only by the invincible faith, that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself .... If he were able to get out of the prison walls of this faith, even for an instant only, his “self-consciousness” would be destroyed at once’ (Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Falsity in an Ultramoral Sense’, The Philosophy of Nietzsche, ed. Geoffrey Clive, trans. Oscar Levy [New York: Meridian, 1996], 510). The German ‘in dem sprachlichen Zwange’ speaks to the constraining, coercive or compelling nature of language. As Kaufmann and Hollingdale translate: ‘We cease to think when we refuse to do so under the constraint of language; we barely reach the doubt that sees this limitation as a limitation’ (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale [New York: Vintage Books, 1967], 283). See German original: ‘Wir hören auf zu denken, wenn wir es nicht in dem sprachlichen Zwange thun wollen, wir langen gerade noch bei dem Zweifel an, hier eine Grenze als Grenze zu sehn’ (Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Bd. VIII, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1974], 197–8). Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990), 136. Heidegger, ‘Language’, Poetry, Language, Thought, 202. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Dissemination: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation’ in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1993), 291–332. George Steiner, Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language of Revolution (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), 4, viii.

Of Home and Hearth: Maps, Histories and Territorial Claims

1. As cited in Geoffrey MacNab, ‘Hooker’s Magic’, Sight & Sound 27 (1999): 26. 2. M.J. Levy in John G. Taylor, From Modernization to Modes of Production: A Critique of the Sociologies of Development and Underdevelopment (London: Macmillan Press, 1976), 3. 3. In Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, 272. 4. Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘The PCI to the Young!! (Notes in Verse for a Prose Poem Followed by an “Apology”)’, Heretical Empiricism, trans. Ben Lawton

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146 Notes

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

and Louise K. Barrett (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2005), 150–1. From ‘The Apology’, ibid., 156. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Touchstone, 1988), 313. For an elaborate (if entirely uncritical) compendium to the schismatic political climate at the time of Moro’s murder and after – the ‘bourgeois entropy’ and confected marginalist dogma into which the young left had fallen – see Sylvére Lotringer and Christian Marazzi eds. Italy: Autonomia – Post-Political Politics, Semiotext(e) Vol. III. No. 9, 1980. The ‘spoiled children’ played right into the hands of their enemies during these anni di piombo ... George Armstrong Kelly, ‘A Note on Alienation’, Political Theory, 1(1) (February 1973): 46. Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation, 57. Said, Orientalism, 206. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1966), 44, 48. Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 99. Ibid., 101. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1979), 98. See James Roy MacBean, ‘Vent d’Est or Godard and Rocha at the Crossroads’ in Bill Nichols, ed. Movies and Methods: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 91–111. Ibid., 93. James Monaco, The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 229. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1997), 19. Ibid., 21. In his earlier Vent d’est (1970), Godard (and collaborator Gorin) played on the relation of ethics to aesthetics, a dialectical relation wrapped in the programmatic slogan: ‘Ce n’est pas une image juste, c’est juste une image/This is not a just image, it’s just an image’ (Colin MacCabe, Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics [London: British Film Institute, 1980], 60). Mahmoud Darwish, ‘Speech of the Red Indian’, in Munir Akash and Daniel Moore eds. The Adam of Two Edens (Syracuse: Jusoor and Syracuse University Press, 2000), 127–45. Ben White, ‘Dispossession, Soil, and Identity in Palestinian and Native American Literature’, Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics and Culture 12(2 & 3) (2005): 149. Peter Handke, Sommerlicher Nachtrag zu einer winterlichen Reise (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998), 249. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 126n30; see also Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! (London: Verso, 2002), 39. Godard had in fact made such a ‘documentary/fiction’, Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) in 1976 with Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean-Pierre Gorin. Begun as an Al Fatah-commissioned project with his old Dziga Vertov Group

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Notes 147

26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

partner Gorin as Jusqu’à la victoire (Till Victory) in 1970, the project faltered over political differences, the deaths of many of their subjects in the violent clashes between Palestinians and Jordan in the ‘Black September’ of that year, and Gorin subsequently leaving the Dziga Vertov partnership. Godard and Miéville returned to the project as a reflective piece on ‘text and image’ in which technique and positionality are examined (a patent revision, in fact, with a suitably self-reflexive, if cravenly exculpatory narrative ... Shotcontre shot) and completed Ici et Allieurs in 1974, released 1976. See MacCabe, Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics (Miéville has been Godard’s personal and creative companion since and is credited with ‘Artistic Direction’ in Our Music.) See Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1996), 64, 77. Ibid., 25. Godard, ‘In Sarajevo, the “Jew of the cinema” cultivates a sense of optimism’, interview with Jacques Mandelbaum and Thomas Sotinel, Le Monde in Notre Musique Pressbook (New York: Wellspring Productions, 2004). Ibid. Godard made these same nonsensical assertions about the Muselmänner in voice-over in Samir Gloor-Fadel’s 1999 documentary Berlin-Cinema, all the time wondering why the Germans called Jews ‘Muslims’. He seems to have forgotten these simplistic musings in Notre Musique ... See Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955), 11. Importantly, especially in view of Judith’s optimistic spirit and her short tussle with Levinas and his ethico-ontological moment, Camus goes on to say: ‘I have never seen anyone die for the ontological’ (ibid., 11). This is, perhaps, obvious ... Godard, ‘The Godard Interview: I, a Man of the Image’, Interview with Michael Witt, Sight & Sound (June 2005), 12 April 2008 www.bfi.org.uk/ sightandsound/issue/200506/ Bruce Robbins, ‘Solidarity and Worldliness: for Edward Said’, Logos 3.1 (Winter 2004), 12 January 2008 www.logosjournal.com/robbins.htm Ibid. Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, 175. Ibid., 176. Ibid., 173. Ibid., 177. Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of Literature, trans. George G. Grabowcz (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 294–5. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), 407. Robbins, ‘Solidarity and Worldliness: for Edward Said’. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. (my emphasis). Ibid. Renata Salecl, ‘Psychoanalysis and War: The Case of Bosnia’ (Paper delivered at the ‘Psychoanalysis and Cultural Malaise’ Conference [Annual Conference

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148 Notes

47.

48.

49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

of the Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis in the Freudian Field], The Australian National University, Canberra [20 August 1994]). A version of this paper was subsequently published in her book The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism after the Fall of Socialism (London: Routledge, 1994). See 11–20. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3. Rastko Moc´nik too sees a fantasy in the Balkans, a fiction but not one interiorized like some auto-Orientalism. ‘The people of the Orient interiorise Orientalist fiction no more than so-called Westerners do,’ he argues. ‘Rather, that fiction is a universal Baedeker, cherished and used for its practicality, not because it represents some mysterious colonization of the mind ... Ever since the West fell for the political-correctness craze,’ writes Moc´nik, ‘the manual actually sells better in the region itself’ (Rastko Moc´nik, ‘The Balkans as an Element in Ideological Mechanisms’ in Dušan I. Bjelic´ and Obrad Savic´, eds. Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation [Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005], 85). In E.M. Forster’s Room with a View, Baedeker’s guide is an omnipresent symptom of a certain Orientalism, even in the bosom of the West: Italy. ‘Tut, tut! Miss Lucy!’, admonished her chaperone, the ‘clever lady’ Miss Lavish. ‘I hope we shall soon emancipate you from Baedeker. He does but touch the surface of things. As to the true Italy – he does not even dream of it. The true Italy is only to be found by patient observation’ (Forster, Room with a View [London: Penguin Books, 2001], 15). Baedeker, Frommer’s, even The Rough Guide and Lonely Planet – their volumes and catalogues grow as countries fall apart. These kinds of genre films are of course nowhere more evident than in Hollywood, but this dichotomy of spatial metaphor in German cinema is notable for its mobilization and exploitation by Nazism. After the war, the Heimatfilm would continue – this time under the normative sway of American culture – until the rise of the so-called new German cinema (the likes of Kluge, Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders) in the late 1960s and 1970s. For an excellent account of the broader ‘culture’ of the Heimat, see Celia Applegate, ‘The Question of Heimat in the Weimar Republic’, New Formations (Summer 1992) 17: 26–35. On the vision of the New German Cinema, the demise of which is dated to Fassbinder’s death in 1982, see Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), 13. Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom, 15. Salecl glosses over the actions inherent in the Croatian ‘national redefinition’, which included the perpetration of the same base excesses as their Serb aggressors (ibid., 144n112). Ibid., 16. Ibid., 16. See Fouad Ajami, ‘Under Western Eyes: The Fate of Bosnia’, Survival 41(2) (Summer 1999): 36–7 for a more thorough analysis of this ethnic calamity. Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom, 17. Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation, 4–5. Ibid., 4. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 290. See Rebecca West’s

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Notes 149

57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

65.

66. 67.

Notes observations of a ‘Balkanism’ of an earlier variety in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: a Journey through Yugoslavia (New York: Viking Press, 1941), 20. Leslie H. Gelb, The New York Times, 8 April 1993 as cited in Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom, 13. Michael Vickery, Cambodia: 1975–1982 (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), 28. Writing on the politics of conflict and the role played by Buddhism in Cambodia, Vickery argues in a manner more than germane to the position put by Salecl regarding Muslims of the Balkans: ‘Probably more arrant nonsense has been written in the West about Buddhism than about any other aspect of Southeast Asian life. Like every other major religion, Buddhism as it is practiced in the countries where it has ancient roots is a concretion of certain admirable philosophical and moral principles with beliefs and practices that date from pre-Buddhist times, prejudices peculiar to the society, special relationships with ruling classes, and the ability to rationalize the pursuit of material gain, as well as a good many other actions which are contrary to its principles. That Buddhists may torture and massacre is no more astonishing than that the Inquisition burned people or that practicing Catholics and protestants joined the Nazi SS’ (ibid., 9). Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, 248 (my emphasis). Ibid., 248. E.H. Carr, What is History? (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990), 23. George Konrád, The Melancholy of Rebirth: Essays from Post-Communist Central Europe, 1989–1994, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1995). Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 112, 113 (my emphasis). Etienne Balibar, ‘Is there a “Neo-Racism”?’ in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1991), 22. Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 226. The postmodern racist expresses ‘horror and revulsion’ at certain racial conflicts but argues quickly for a ‘contextualisation’ of these issues, argues Žižek, pointing to the existence of a sort of ‘contemporary Babilon [sic]’ in which one’s sense of ethnic and cultural identity is ‘losing ground’ – we must expect certain casualties, the argument goes, when ‘cosmopolitic universalists’ propagate this Babylon in the name of ‘multiculturalism’ (ibid., 226). Salecl too advances Balibar’s argument in The Spoils of Freedom, 12. Ibid., 226. Žižek, The Fragile Absolute or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000), 5. In a disingenuous stroke of self-reflexivity in his second book he laments the lack of his own ‘ideological hailing’ as a Slovene in the work of Freud: ‘There is only one mention of a “Slovene” in Freud’s entire opus ...’ (Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor [London: Verso, 1991], 7–8). Žižek not only laments this fact but takes considerable umbrage at Freud’s apparent dismissal of the Slovene as ‘someone unworthy of psychoanalytic care, with the implication it is a simple case of direct, superficial evil, immorality, without any kind of “depth” that pertains to our unconscious psychic dynamic ...’ (ibid., 8). This reflexivity, however, emerges as a pathetic solipsism (perhaps a defensive

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150

74. 75. 76.

egoism), as Žižek increasingly comes to protest just a little too much about his own (strangely nationalist) subject position – viz., his passionate and apparent desire to identify with Mitteleuropa rather than the ‘Balkan brotherhood’, particularly the former Yugoslavia’s residual, if purely symbolic, suzerainty over his region (‘the indivisible remainder’?). And Freud’s ‘unanalysable (unanalysierbares)’ Slovene resurfaces, Žižek protestations gathering steam as he resiles increasingly from his old Yugoslavian Heimat and sidles ever closer to a better neighbourhood in the European Union. See Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: Essays on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), 1. Longinovich has referred to this solipsism, this ‘self-possession and presencing’ in Žižek as mere ‘postmodern nationalism’ (Toma Longinovich, ‘Indivisible Reminders’, ARTMargins [15 April 2001], 18 March 2008 www. artmargins.com). Ibid., 5–6 (my emphasis). Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, 112. Dušan I. Bjelic´, ‘The Balkans: Europe’s Cesspool’, Cultural Critique 62 (Winter 2006): 34. See Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and Modern Conscience (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1998), 36. See also: Sergei Medvedev and Peter van Ham, Mapping European Security after Kosovo (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 39. Schopenhauer in Freud, ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1971) Volume XVIII: 101. A bunch of cold porcupines, huddling together to keep warm, realize their spines are less than comfortable ‘[s]o that they were driven backwards and forwards from one trouble to the other, until they had discovered a mean distance at which they could most tolerably exist’ (ibid., 101n1). A mean not between extremes, but between intimacies! Jovan Raškovic´ in Bjelic´, ‘The Balkans: Europe’s Cesspool’, 33. Jane Gallop referred to Kristeva as the ‘vulgar Bulgar’ for what she perceived to be the ‘narcissistic self-reference’ of her early theory (Jane Gallop, The Daughters’ Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982], 120). Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 62. Žižek, The Fragile Absolute, 4. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 62.

3

The Subject Missing: Erasure and the Reflexive Margin

68. 69. 70.

71.

72. 73.

1. Baudrillard, ‘On Nihilism’, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Shiela Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 160. We can see Baudrillard’s progenitor here: ‘The “real world” – an idea no longer of any use, not even a duty any longer – an idea grown useless, superfluous, consequently a refuted idea: let us abolish it!... (... Plato blushes for shame; all free spirits run riot.) We have abolished the real world: what world is left? The apparent world perhaps? ... But no! With the real world we have also abolished the apparent world!’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R.J. Hollingdale [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968], 40–1). No doubt, this is radical stuff but Baudrillard’s Nietzscheanism is tepid and insufficient,

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Notes 151

2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

even for his purposes – none of it actually functions, none of it in the human realm of the narratives at hand. It is fiction. Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 159. Spivak, ‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography’ in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak eds. Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 17–18. Douglas Kellner, Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern (London: Routledge, 1995), 259. Ibid., 259. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 368. Horst Ruthrof, Semantics and the Body: Meaning from Frege to the Postmodern (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998), 21. Ibid., 230, 238. Althusser, For Marx, 233–4. Barthes, Writer Sollers, trans. Philip Thody (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1987), 45. Althusser, Reading Capital, 16. Althusser, For Marx, 233. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1971), 163. Ibid., 139. Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Baker (London: Verso, 2005), 58–9. Althusser, ‘Marx’s Relation to Hegel’, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx: Politics and History, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1982), 182–4. Ibid., 184–6. Ibid., 184. François Matheron, ‘Preface’ to Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 1997), 15. Althusser, ‘On the Content of Thought of G.W.F. Hegel’, The Spectre of Hegel, 87. Ibid., 85. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 5. Not only was Badiou a student of Althusser and one of the French Mao gang, he is an avid Hegelian, if not strictly in practice. As if to shout that he, Alain Badiou, has indeed a théorie du sujet, he seeks it out in others. He made the same assertion about Deleuze, in whom, he argues, obtains no philosophy of the subject because, it would seem, he is not Hegelian enough! (See Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamour of Being, trans. Louise Burchill [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000], 79–81). Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 7. Adorno does go on here to discuss what he calls ‘the incapacitation of the subject’ under the hand of philosophers subsequent to but still beholden to Hegel. He states: ‘... to a great extent the subject came to be an ideology, a screen for society’s objective functional context and a palliative for the subject’s suffering under society. In this sense – and not just today – the not-I has moved drastically ahead of the I’ (ibid., 66–7). Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, 226–7. Percy, ‘The Man on the Train’, The Message in the Bottle, 88. ‘Entrapped in being, we shall always have to come out of it. And when we are hardly outside

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152 Notes

27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

of being, we always have to go back into it. Thus in being, everything is circuitous, roundabout, recurrent, so much talk; a chaplet of sojournings, a refrain with endless verses .... One no longer knows right away whether one is running toward the centre or escaping’ (Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 213–14). Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, 230. See also Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969), 74. ‘We see the essence of the thing through the middle of the play of forces and only through this mediation does consciousness arrive at things as they are themselves, at the supersensible. And this consciousness is the understanding’ (Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 116). Ibid., 220, 229. Walter Kaufmann, Hegel: A Reinterpretation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), 138. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, 251. Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 140. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 49. Freud, ‘Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious’, The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, trans. A.A. Brill (New York: The Modern Library, 1966), 707. Ibid., 49. Sartre, The Freud Scenario, trans. Quintin Hoare, ed. J.-B. Pontalis (London: Verso, 1985), xii. In the film Sartre renders the scene of ‘bad faith’ in an exchange between Freud and the character of his former Professor of Psychiatry at the Vienna University, Theodor Meynert. Meynert, having objected to Freud’s use of hypnosis and his intention to visit Charcot in Paris and derided him for his affirmation of the existence of male hysteria, on his death bed confides in Freud that he himself had suffered from hysteria, that he had known about it long before Charcot, having suffered all its maladies for the past 20 years. (Freud himself recalls the exchange in the analysis of one of his own dreams where the image of his father appears as a ‘screen’ for his former ‘high and mighty idol’ Meynert: ‘ “You know,” he confessed to Freud, “I was always one of the clearest cases of male hysteria” ’ (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey [London: George Allen & Unwin, 1967], 438). Meynert had denied precisely what he knew to be ailing him. Elizabeth Roudinesco observes of Sartre’s ‘realization’ of ‘bad faith’: ‘Meynert is a mala fide. He denies the existence of male hysteria although he knows he suffers from it himself. A perfect example [of ‘bad faith’] ... Meynert dies because of his error. We find ourselves again in the Faustian world of science reminiscent of Thomas Mann. It contains Nietzsche and Mann, and at the same time, Sartre’s idea of German philosophy. Meynert is brilliant right up to the end. A splendid Sartrean personality. He dies from his own error’ (Roudinesco as interviewed in Sartre, a film by Michel Favart and André Waksman, 1992). Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 5. Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 206. A voice recording of George Stevens in A Filmmaker’s Journey, a film by George Stevens, Jr. (1984). Zolt Kézdi-Kovács, ‘Hungarian Rhapsodies: Miklós Jancsó’. Movie 66, 1981: 1318. The Round Up is an historico-allegorical account of the Hungarian

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Notes 153

40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56.

57.

Notes government’s security operation during the uprisings that were suppressed during the autumn of 1849. As insurrectionists found refuge in the ranks of highwaymen and bandits, they soon found themselves caught in a good example of rationalized ‘zero tolerance’ – ‘that is how it came about that the police of Count Gedeon Ráday, who applied in his work modern principles of prosecution and criminology, investigated in the cases of ordinary felons and criminally neutral political refugees of the revolution simultaneously’ (István Nemeskürty, Word and Image: History of the Hungarian Cinema, trans. Zsuzsanna Horn and Fred McNichol [Budapest: Corvina Press, 1974], 199–200). Primo Levi, If This is a Man/The Truce, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 1999), 15. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 27. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 62. Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, trans. Arthur Denner and Abigail Pollack (London: Phoenix, 2000), 261. ‘(I am not sure this era is entirely behind us)’, he concludes. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 62. Todorov, Facing the Extreme, 261. As cited in Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 32 (my emphasis). This ‘identification with the aggressor’, in the specific context of the concentration camps, is well articulated by camp (Buchenwald and Dachau) survivor and psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim in ‘Individual and Mass Behaviour in Extreme Situations’, Surviving and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 48–83. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 22–52. Levi, If This is a Man/The Truce, 15. Ibid., 15. Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (New York: Avon, 1980), 18. Ibid., 18. ‘The movies are onto the search,’ argues Percy, ‘but they screw it up. The search always ends in despair. They like to show a fellow coming to himself in a strange place – but what does he do? He takes up with the local librarian, sets about proving to the local children what a nice fellow he is, and settles down with a vengeance. In two weeks’ time he is so sunk in everydayness he might just as well be dead’ (ibid., 18). Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 615. William S. Burroughs, Nova Express (New York: Grove Press, 1992), 114, 178. [In 1981 the recordings on which much of this writing was based appeared as Nothing Here Now But the Recordings (London: Industrial Records (L.P.), 1981), compiled Genesis P-Orridge]. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1967), 489–91. ‘These phantasies or daydreams are the immediate forerunners of hysterical symptoms, or at least of a whole number of them. Hysterical symptoms are not attached to actual memories,’ he argues, ‘but to phantasies erected on the basis of memories’ (ibid., 491n1).

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154

58. Lyotard, ‘The dream-work does not think’, 19. Lyotard takes Freud’s section ‘Considerations of Representability’ (Rücksicht auf Darstellbarkeit) as ‘considerations of figurability’, elaborating on Freud’s point that the dream’s ‘text must become “imaged” text … figured’ (ibid., 29). For Freud, a ‘thing that is pictorial is, from the point of view of the dream, a thing that is capable of being represented’ (The Interpretation of Dreams, 339–40). Lyotard puts the ‘figure’ into the textual workings of the dream, translating Freud’s ‘darstellungsfähig’ (‘represented’ in Strachey) as ‘figured’ – exhibited in an ‘imaged text’. 59. Philip Auslander, ‘Behind the Scenes: Gregor Schneider’s Totes Haus ur’, PAJ 75 (2003): 86–90. 60. As Bachelard cites Monteiro: ‘Who has not deep in his heart/A dark castle of Elsinore’ (Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 50). 61. ‘Space, but you cannot even conceive the horrible inside-outside that real space is’ (Henri Michaux, L’espace aux ombres as cited in Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 216). 62. Ibid., 48. 63. Ruthrof, Semantics and the Body, 229.

4

Conflation, Contradiction and the Colonized Mind

1. Said, ‘Foreword’, Selected Subaltern Studies, viii (my emphasis). 2. Christy Collis, ‘Vertical Body/Horizontal World: Sir John Franklin and Fictions of Arctic Space’ in Leigh Dale and Simon Ryan, eds. The Body in the Library (Amsterdam/Atlanta: Ridopi, 1998), 226. 3. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 202. 4. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 157. 5. Althusser, For Marx, 234. 6. V.N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik (New York: Seminar Press, 1973), 13. 7. Terdiman, ‘The Marginality of Michel de Certeau’, 403. 8. Ibid., 403–4. 9. Percy, ‘The Man on the Train’, The Message in the Bottle, 89. 10. Walker Percy, ‘The Man on the Train’, The Message in the Bottle (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981), 89. 11. Ibid., 230. 12. Ibid., 230–1. 13. Ibid., 230–1. 14. Baudrillard, ‘The Precession of Simulacra’, Simulacra and Simulation, 1. 15. Paul Foss, ‘Theatrum Nondum Cognitorum’, The Foreign Bodies Papers, ed. Peter Botsman, Chris Burns and Peter Hutchings (Sydney: Local Consumption Publications, 1981), 23, 64 (This amounts to perhaps the first English translation of concepts emergent from Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille Plateaux which Foss, Paul Patton and Meaghan Morris et al. dissected and disseminated through their various ‘guerilla translations’ during the early 1980s in Australia). 16. Baudrillard, ‘The Precession of Simulacra’, 2. 17. Ibid., 1. 18. Jacques Derrida, ‘Semiology and Grammatology: Interview with Julia Kristeva’, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (London: The Athlone Press, 1981), 17.

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Notes 155

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30.

Notes Here the reference is to Derrida’s earlier assertion that ‘One can say with total security that there is nothing fortuitous about the fact that the critique of ethnocentrism – the very condition of ethnology – should be systematically and historically contemporaneous with the destruction of the history of metaphysics. Both belong to one and the same era’ (Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, Writing and Difference, 282). Ibid., 17. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 280–1. Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), 184. Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002), 112. Ibid., 113. Much has been made (and lost) of the translational issues surrounding Brecht’s Verfremsdungs-effekt. Martin Puchner, for example, argues: ‘Brecht’s term Verfremdung has in fact nothing to do with Marx’s Entfremdung, which has been correctly translated as “alienation,” as in “alienation from nature” or “alienated labor.” Brecht’s Verfremdung, in contrast, must be translated as “estrangement,” which implies making something unfamiliar, or strange, a term Brecht inherits from the Russian formalists’ ostranenje. It is true that Brecht did think about “alienation” [Enfremdung], but this term is at all times distinct in its meaning from the German Verfremdung’ (Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality and Drama [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Unversity Press, 2002], 204n2). The idea that Brecht’s notion ‘has nothing to do with Marx’ is, at least, tendentious ... Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the jews’, trans. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 39 (my emphasis). On this ‘silence of survival’ see also Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 4; and Bruno Bettelheim, Surviving and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979). Ibid., 39–40. Henryk Górecki, ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’, Symphony No. 3, Opus 36 (1976), cond. David Zinman, London Sinfonietta, liner notes, David Drew, lyrics trans., Krystyna Carter. Elektra Nonesuch (Warner), 7559-79282-2, 1992. Ibid., Liner notes, David Drew. Ibid., Lyrics trans., Krystyna Carter. See Alan E. Steinweis and Daniel E. Rogers, ‘Nazi Germany: New Questions, New Perspectives’ in Alan E. Steinweis and Daniel E. Rogers, eds. The Impact of Nazism: New Perspectives on the Third Reich and Its Legacy (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), xi. Chris Berry, ‘Dennis O’Rourke’s Original Sin: the Good Woman of Bangkok, or “Is This What They Mean by ‘Australia in Asia’ ” ’, in Chris Berry, Annette Hamilton and Laleen Jayamanne, eds. The Filmmaker and the Prostitute: Dennis O’Rourke’s The Good Woman of Bangkok (Sydney: Power Publications, 1997), 40. It should be noted that Berry edited this volume along with Hamilton and Jayamanne and appears to be adding some critical perspective to the undertaking. However, when it comes to ‘critical distance’, Berry’s own male-feminist position is as transparent and as palpably resilient as the others.

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156

31. Editors’ introduction, Bertolt Brecht, The Good Person of Szechwan, eds. John Willett and Ralph Manheim, trans. John Willett (London: Methuen Drama Series, 1996), iv. 32. Stuart Hall in Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, a film by Isaac Julian, 1995. 33. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Weidenfield, 1967), 161. 34. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, ed. and trans. Roger Crisp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 35–6. 35. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 28 (my emphasis). 36. George Yúdice, ‘Marginality and the Ethics of Survival’, Social Text 21, Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism (1989), 216. 37. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xvii. 38. de Certeau, ‘idéologie et diversité culturelle’, Diversité culturelle, Société Industrielle, Etat national (1984) as cited in and translated by Winifred Woodhull, ‘Exile’, Yale French Studies 82, Post/Colonial Conditions: Exiles, Migrations, and Nomadisms, 1 (1993), 11. 39. Woodhull, ibid., 11. 40. Albert Memmi, Dominated Man: Notes toward a Portrait, trans. Eleanor Levieux (London: Orion Press, 1968), 88. 41. Richard Terdiman, ‘The Response of the Other’, Diacritics 22(2) (Summer 1992), 8. 42. Ibid., 8. 43. As cited in Richard Stamelman, ‘The Strangeness of the Other and the Otherness of the Stranger: Edmond Jabès’, Yale French Studies 82, Post/ Colonial Conditions: Exiles, Migrations, and Nomadisms, 1 (1993), 126. 44. Ibid., 126. 45. Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1976), 32. 46. Jacques Derrida, ‘Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book’, Writing and Difference, 66. 47. Ibid., 65. 48. G.W.F. Hegel, ‘The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate’, Early Theological Writings, trans. T.M. Knox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 185. 49. Ibid., 185–7. 50. As cited in Stamelman, ‘The Strangeness of the Other’, 126n. 51. Derrida, ‘Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book’, Writing and Difference, 66. 52. Ibid., 68. 53. Jabés, The Book of Questions, as cited in Derrida, Writing and Difference, 67. 54. Ibid., 67. 55. Ibid., 67 and 311n3. Harold Bloom, writing on poetic influence, goes further: ‘There are no interpretations but only misinterpretations, and so all criticism is prose poetry’ (Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry [London: Oxford University Press, 1973], 95). 56. Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, Writing and Difference, 292. 57. Ibid., 278. 58. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 8. 59. Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, 292.

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Notes 157

60. Mark C. Taylor, foreword to Edmond Jabès, The Book of Margins, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), x. 61. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, as cited in Stamelman, ‘The Strangeness of the Other’, 127. 62. Ibid., 127. 63. Jabès, The Book of Margins, ix. 64. Ibid., ix–x. 65. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 362–3. Heiner Müller, on the staging of his Berliner Ensemble’s Hamlet in Berlin after the fall of the Wall, was asked in an interview for Der Spiegel if ‘it is even possible to stage plays at times like these?’ ‘You can stage plays,’ he responds, ‘but the question is whether you can still sell them’ (‘Without Hope and without Despair’, Germania, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Bernard and Caroline Schütze [New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1990], 241). While Müller here is clearly not ‘quoting’ Adorno, the irony is not lost as the ‘coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity’ suggested by Adorno has been replayed with significant alacrity and cold profit since the Wall came down around the ears of those ‘who were spared’. 66. Derrida, ‘Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book’, Writing and Difference, 65.

5

The Curious Heimat: Fetishism, Rupture, Boundary

1. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, 219. 2. Ibid., 93 (my emphasis). 3. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1973), 9. 4. Ibid., 6. 5. Ibid., 9. 6. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Partial Drive and its Circuit’, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), 182. 7. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1982), 59. 8. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow, 1956), 8. 9. Balibar, Reading Capital, 286. 10. As cited in ibid., 287. 11. Althusser, Reading Capital, 27. 12. Ibid., 86. ‘... by discovering that the truth of history cannot be read in its manifest discourse, because the text of history cannot be read in its manifest discourse, because the text of history is not a text in which a voice (the Logos) speaks, but the inaudible and illegible notation of the effects of a structure of structures.’ (Ibid., 17). 13. Ibid., 17. 14. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1991), 11. 15. Ibid., 128. 16. Althusser, Reading Capital, 17, 24 (my emphasis).

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158 Notes

17. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 15. 18. Marx, Capital, 177. 19. Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlooks (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 98. 20. As Kaufmann points out while distinguishing between the German and English senses of the term. In English, self-consciousness connotes a certain embarrassment and diffidence while in German, the term (selbstbewusstsein) means precisely the opposite: self-assuredness and pride. While he indicates both senses point to self-awareness – the primary meaning for Hegel – the contradictory connotations are pertinent to the disposition of the Hegelian identity (Kaufmann, Hegel: A Reinterpretation, 136–7). 21. Said, ‘Between Worlds’, London Review of Books, 20(9) 7 May 1998: 7. 22. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 5. 23. Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 1983), 21. 24. Thomas K. Brown, ‘ “Verfremdung” in Action at the Berliner Ensemble’, The German Quarterly, 46(4) (November 1973): 526. See also Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Making Things Strange: The Prehistory of a Literary Device’, Representations 56 Special Issue: The New Erudition (Autumn 1996): 8–28. 25. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1949), 38. 26. Bloch argued that Brecht’s Verfremdungs-effekt is ‘directed against that very alienation which has doubled in strength as people have grown accustomed to it. Therefore, people must be startled awake, if they are not to lose their powers of sight and hearing. Brecht’s language,’ he continues, ‘is specifically directed toward awakening the hearer .... The actor speaks this language as if he were reciting someone else’s words: as if he stood beside the other, distancing himself, and never embodying the other’ (Ernst Bloch, ‘ “Entfremdung, Verfremdung”: Alienation, Estrangement’ [1962], trans. Anne Halley and Darko Suvin, The Drama Review: TDR 15[1] [Autumn 1970]: 124). 27. Heiner Müller, Germania, 14. 28. Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, 18. 29. Said, Orientalism, 51. 30. Zachary Lockman, ‘Critique from the Right: The Neo-Conservative Assault on Middle East Studies’, CR: The New Centennial Review, 5(1) (Spring 2005): 63. 31. Said, Orientalism, 50. 32. Ibid., 59. 33. See Tomislav Z. Longinovic´, ‘Vampires Like Us: Gothic Imagery “the serbs” ’ in Bjelic´ and Savic´, Balkan as Metaphor, 39–60. 34. Mohammad R. Nafissi, ‘Reframing Orientalism: Weber and Islam’, Economy and Society 27(1) (February 1998): 97. 35. Edmund Burke III, ‘Orientalism and World History: Representing Middle Eastern Nationalism and Islamism in the Twentieth Century’, Theory and Society 27(4) Special Issue on Interpreting Historical Change at the End of the Twentieth Century (August 1998): 492–3. 36. Nafissi, ‘Reframing Orientalism: Weber and Islam’, 97–8. 37. Ibid., 98. 38. Ibid., 115.

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Notes 159

39. Burke, ‘Orientalism and World History’, 497. 40. Ibid., 497. 41. Foucault, ‘Dialogue between Michel Foucault and Baqir Parham: On Marx, Islam, Christianity and Revolution’ in Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson eds. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 74–5. 42. There is an industry in this form of critical puritanism. Heidegger’s flirtation with Nazism is signal. Critics variously and periodically pick at this chestnut as a means to show some inherent failure, at least flaw in their subjects’ thinking – there goes the entire history of philosophical thought! Sartre’s less than onerous experience during the war that allowed him the luxury of writing Being and Nothingness, then, at the other end of his career, his visit and offer of support to the imprisoned Andreas Baader in Germany; the failure of Barthes and Camus to denounce, along with their Leftist colleagues, the Algerian War in the sixties; Roger Garaudy, former PCF member, Catholic and bête noire of Foucault, converted to Islam and holocaust denial in the early eighties; the rabid Maoism of many of the Left during the late sixties and seventies – Barthes again, Kristeva, Sollers, Glucksmann, Badiou, and so on. Mike Rubbo’s film on the lead up to the 1978 French elections, Solzhenitsyn’s Children Are Making a Lot of Noise in Paris (1979), tracks down some of the French Left mentioned above and their various adversaries. He finds Sollers at a cocktail party where, questioned on a virtual career of political repositioning, he declares himself a political Dadaist, adding that in matters political a ‘little zig and a little zag’ is necessary. He has a lot to say, so he changes his mind a lot. ‘One must have a sense of humour about these things,’ he muses in a fug of cigar smoke. 43. Martin Amis, ‘The Age of Horrorism (Part Three)’, The Observer, Sunday (10 September 2006) as at 2 January 2008 www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/ sep/10/september11.politicsphilosophyandsociety2 44. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, 209. Huntington’s work remains both unfashionable and controversial, dismissed by the liberal Left while sometimes confounding the similarly inward-looking conservative Right, with whom he is most often aligned. It appeared in its original form as a short essay (‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ Foreign Affairs 72[3] [Summer 1993]: 22–49); the considerable debate following ensured its appearance in an expanded book form from which, as Lockman points out, ‘the question mark disappeared’ (Lockman, ‘Critique from the Right’, 107n2). While his Grand Theory of civilizational discontent may well be flawed – and politically convenient or even just politically symptomatic; an earnest version of the ironical West is the best refrain from The Doors’ The End (one can imagine him fancying himself Martin Sheen as Willard the assassin in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, waking from his febrile sleep as that song fades, rising to look out on the busy streets of Saigon: ‘Saigon. Shit! Still only in Saigon’ ... anyway) – his insights are well-grounded in the endeavours of both academe and realpolitik and cannot simply be ignored. 45. Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (London: Verso, 2002). Ali’s opening gambit makes his thesis plain: ‘My argument that the most dangerous “fundamentalism” today – the “mother of all

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160 Notes

46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

fundamentalisms” is American imperialism – has been amply vindicated over the last eighteen months’ (ibid., xi). Gilbert Achcar, The Clash of Barbarisms: The Making of New World Disorder, trans. Peter Drucker (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2002). See article by John F. Burns, ‘Victims and Criminals on All Sides’, The New York Times, 4 June 1992, in which Burns points out atrocities from all quarters of the Bosnian conflict. Fred Halliday, ‘The Left and the Jihad’, openDemocracy (7 September 2006), 21 January 2008 www.opendemocracy.net/node/3886/pdf. Said, Orientalism, 72. Ibid., 72. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: I Hell, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976). Here Dante casts Christians and the progenitors of Islam alike as ‘Sowers of Discord’ who are witnessed being ‘smitten asunder by a Demon with a sword’; they send their warnings to those left on Earth and, in the case of Mahomet, lest they follow the ‘dreary route’ of Islam: ‘So gaped as one I saw there, from the chin / Down to the fart-hole split as by a cleaver / His tripes hung by his heels; the pluck and spleen / Showed with the liver and the sordid sack / That turns to dung the food it swallows in. / I stood and stared; he saw me and stared back; / Then with his hands wrenched open his own breast, / Crying: “See how I rend myself! What rack / Mangles Mahomet! Weeping without rest / Ali before me goes, his whole face slit / By one great stroke upward from chin to crest/ All these whom thou beholdest in the pit / Were sowers of scandal. Sowers of schism abroad / While they yet lived; therefore they now go split ... . Thus unto Mahomet, with one foot / Lifted to leave use; having said, he straight / Stretched it to the earth and went his dreary route” ’ (ibid., 246–7). Homi Bhaba, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1997), 73. Ibid., 75 (my emphasis). Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), 51. Marc Sageman, ‘Portrait of a Modern Terrorist Group’, New Scientist, 2 February 2008, 197(2641): 46–7. Phillip K. Hitti, History of the Arabs: From the Earliest Times to the Present (London: Macmillan, 1970), 447; see also Farhad Daftary, The Isma¯’ıˉlıˉs: Their History and Doctrines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 10–14. Hitti, History of the Arabs, 446. ‘ “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.” The last words of Hassan i Sabbah, Old Man of the Mountain. “Tamaghis ... Ba’dan ... Yass-Waddah ... Waghdas ... Naufana ... Ghadis.” It is said that an initiate who wishes to know the answer to any question need only repeat these words as he falls asleep and the answer will come in a dream’ (Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night [New York: Holt, 1981], 158). Burroughs’s mystical conceit, he admits, came to him from Gysin, who suggested this utterance as some kind of bedtime prescription for rendering the meaning of his own dreams, Gysin himself having no recollection of the origins of these names (Burroughs in conversation with Edmund White, ‘This is Not a Mammal: A Visit with William Burroughs’ in Allen Hibbard, ed. Conversations with William Burroughs [Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1999], 137). Burroughs

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Notes 161

59. 60.

61. 62.

Notes spells out the metaphysical construct with the following penetrating question: ‘What scared you all into time? Into body? Into shit? I will tell you: “the word” ... Prisoner, come out. The great skies are open. I Hassan i Sabbah rub out the word forever’ (Burroughs, Nova Express, 12). Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 285. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (with Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann) (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 150. As Kaufmann argues, ‘[t]he striking slogan is plainly neither Nietzsche’s coinage nor his motto. It is a quotation on which he comments, contrasting it with the unquestioning faith in the truth that characterizes so many so-called free spirits’ (ibid., 150n7). He continues: ‘The Assassin’s slogan is often mistaken for Nietzsche’s coinage and derived from Dostoevsky ... In Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov we encounter the idea that, if mankind lost the belief in God and immortality, “everything would be permitted.” But what matters to Nietzsche in this section is the first half of this quotation, “nothing is true,” which has no parallel in Dostoevsky’ (ibid., 150n8). In any case, Kaufmann points out, ‘Nietzsche never read The Brothers’ and shows us to the quotation’s variation in The Will to Power: ‘Everything is false! Everything is permitted!’ (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 326). Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 97–8. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 123.

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162

Achcar, Gilber. The Clash of Barbarisms: The Making of New World Disorder. Trans. Peter Drucker. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2002. Adorno, Theodor W. The Jargon of Authenticity. Trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederick Will. London: Routledge, 2003. ——. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 1978. ——. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. New York: Seabury Press, 1973. ——. Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1997. Adorno, Theodor W. and Horkheimer, Max. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. London: Verso, 1973. Afary, Janet and Anderson, Kevin B. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Ajami, Fouad. ‘Iraq and the Arabs’ Future’ Foreign Affairs 82(1) (Jan/Feb 2003): 2–18. ——. ‘Under Western Eyes: The Fate of Bosnia’ Survival 41(2) (Summer 1999): 35–52. Ali, Tariq. The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity. London: Verso, 2002. Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy: I Hell. Trans. Dorothy L. Sayers. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. ——. La Divina Commedia: Paradiso. Milano: Edizione San Paolo, 1987. Althusser, Louis. For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Verso, 1979. ——. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: NLB, 1977. ——. Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx: Politics and History. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Verso, 1982. ——. The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings. Trans. G.M. Goshgarian. London: Verso, 1997. Althusser, Louis and Balibar, Etienne. Reading Capital. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Verso, 1979. Amis, Martin. ‘The Age of Horrorism (Part Three)’ The Observer, Sunday (10 September 2006), 2 January 2008 www.guardian.co.uk. Apocalypse Now. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. Scr. John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola. 1979. Applegate, Celia. ‘The Question of Heimat in the Weimar Republic’ New Formations 17. (Summer 1992): 27–35. Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Ed. Roger Crisp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Auslander, Philip. ‘Behind the Scenes: Gregor Schneider’s Totes Haus ur’ PAJ 75 (2003): 86–90. L’avventura [The Adventure]. Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni. 1960.

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Achcar, Gilbert, 131 Adorno, Theodor W. and Auschwitz, 114 and cultural criticism, 12, 36 and dialectics, 69, 76 and Frankfurt School and critical theory, 2, 12 and Hegel, 69, 91, 122 and jargon of authenticity, 15 and metaphysics, 63 Ali, Tariq, 131 Alighieri, Dante, and Mohammed (Mahomet) as ‘imposter’ and ‘Sower of Discord’, 132–3, 161n.51 Althusser, Louis and Badiou, 69 and Derrida, 68, 112 and Hegel, 67–9, 84, 118 and ideology, 64–8, 92 and interpellation, 66 and Marx, 118–21, see also Balibar and structuralist Marxism, 1–4 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 35, 75 Apocalypse Now (film), 57, 160n.44 Aristotle, 20, 104 Attenborough, Richard, 71 Auerbach, Eric, 46 Aufhebung (sublation), 18–19, 68–70, 100, 118 Auslander, Philip, 86 L,avventura (film), 75 Bachelard, Gaston and Hegel, 68 and the house, 16 and topophilia, 86–7 Bad Luck (film), 60 Badiou, Alain and Althusser, 67, 152n.23 and Maoism, 160n.42 Balibar, Etienne and Marxism, 118, see also Althusser

and racism, 54 and Žižek, 54 Balkans, 37 and ‘Balkanism’, 48–59, 124, 127, 129 The Barrier (Bariera) (film), 7 Barth, John, 7 Barthes, Roland and French Structuralism, 4, 10 and subjectivity, 65 and ‘textual pleasure’, rupture and perversion, 115–17 Bataille, Georges, 3, 145n.52 Baudrillard, Jean and Borges, 96–7 and Brecht’s Verfremdungs-effekt, 98 and postmodernism, 96–9 Bellochio, Marco, 29 Benjamin, Walter and Brecht, 122–3 and Frankfurt School and critical theory, 2, 12 and historiography, 52 and Nietzsche, 13 Berry, Chris, 101 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 17, 88, 93, 108 Bettelheim, Bruno, 154n.47 Bhabha, Homi, xxiii and displacement and difference, 21 and Freud’s unheimlich and rupture, 16–17 and house of fiction, 15–16 and Said’s ‘Orientalism’, 133–4 The Big Carnival (film), xviii Biskind, Peter, xvii, 141n.18 Bjelic´, Dusa ˇ n I., 56–7, 149n.47, 151n.70 Blanchot, Maurice and alienation, 113 and Kojéve, 3 and marginalism, 23 Bloch, Ernst and Brecht’s Verfremdungs-effekt, 159n.26 175

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Index

Index

Bloom, Harold, 157n.56 Bloom Allan, 29 Bordwell, David and post-theory, 10–12, 25, 141n.27, see also Carroll Borges, Jorge Luis, 21, 95–7 Brecht, Bertholt and critical theory, 12 and Godard, 35, 37, 87 and Verfremdungs-effekt, 98–101, 122–3, 156n.23, 159n.26 A Bronx Tale (film), 71–2 Burroughs, William S., 137–8, 154n.56, 161n.58 Caché (film), 106–7 Cammell, Donald, 23, 136–7 Camus, Albert, 43, 148n.31 Capra, Frank, 6 Carr, E.H., 52 Carroll, Nöel and post-Theory, 10–12, 25, 141n.27, see also Bordwell Castoriadis, Cornelius, 4, 142n.7 Cavani, Liliana, 80 Chinatown (film), 21–2 Chow, Rey, 33 Citizen Piszczyk (film), 60 conformism, 92, 116 The Conformist (film), 93 Conrad, Joseph, xxiii, 58 Copjec, Joan, 14–15 cultural studies, xxii–vi, 2, 7, 14, 17, 19–20, 25, 31, 94, 101, 112, 115, 126 and Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 2, 5–6 and cultural theory, 6–7 and Grand Theory, 10–12, 14, 25, 141n.27 Cyclo (film), 102–3 Darwish, Mahmoud, 38–9, 43, 114 de Certeau, Michel and cultural studies, 94, 143n.11 and figure of reversal, 93 and Hegel, 108 and marginality, 5–6

and ‘new marginalisms’, xix and silent majority, 60, 93 and social communication, 105–8 De Niro, Robert, 71 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 3 Deleuze, Gilles, xvi, 26, 152n.23 and Guattari, Felix, xvi, 6, 96, 141n.17, 155n.15 and ‘minor literature’ and ‘minor language’, xvi and Spivak and Foucault, xi–vi, xxvii, 140n.1 Derrida, Jacques, xxvii, 20, 68, 98, 110–14 Despair (film), 73 diaspora, xx–xxii, 33, 44 the diasporic, xxi–xxii, xxiv, xxv Eagleton, Terry, xv, xxvi, 7, 140n.14 Eisenstein, Sergei, 122–3 exile, 13, 16–21, 25–6 the exilic, xviii, xxi–viii Fanon, Frantz, 7, 25, 103 fascism, 15, 54, 78, 93, 117 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 73, 149n.48 Figgis, Mike, 121 Foss, Paul, 96 Freud, Sigmund, 8, 15, 56 and the dream work, 84–5, 155n.58 and ‘narcissism of minor differences’, 56–7, 151n.71 and relation to Marx, 119 and Sartre, 72–5, 153n.35 and symptom, 65 and the ‘uncanny’ (unheimlich), 16 and ‘Western trauma’, 125 and Žižek, 150n.67 Freud: The Secret Passion (film), 75 Fuller, Peter, xxv Gaghan, Stephen, 128 Ghazy, Randa, 44, 47 Godard, Jean-Luc, x, xxvi, 34–44, 147n.20, 147n.25, 148n.30 Good Morning, Night (film), 29 The Good Woman of Bangkok (film), 101, 156n.30 Gramsci, Antonio, 2, 4, 66, 76

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Index Huntington, Samuel P., 51, 131–2, 160n.44 Huston, John, 75

identity, xviii, xxiv–ix and identitarianism, xvi, xviii, xxviii–xxix, 16, 18, 27–9 ‘of identity and non-identity’ (Hegel), 69–71, 91, 97, 115, 122, 159n.20 and nationalism, 45, 49–50, 150n.65 and politics of, 1, 8–12, 21, 27, 37, 39, 45, 105–24, 130–2 and postmodernism, 62–3 and the scene of fetishism, 134 ideology, xi, xvi, xxviii, 2, 4, 14, 17, 45, 60–1, 73, 76, 78, 84, 92, 95, 109 and Adorno, 152n.24 and Althusser and Marx, 64–7, 121–2 Internal Affairs (film), 121 intimacy, xxiv and home, 16, 87 and ‘the narcissism of minor differences’ (Freud), 57 and the ‘senses at a distance’ (Metz), 116–17, 145n.47 and subjectivity, 21, 78 Ireland, Craig, 11, 76, 142n.1 Islam, xv, xxix, 125–8 and Islamism, 128–31 and the new marginalism, 126, 132, 138 It’s a Wonderful Life (film), 6 Jabés, Edmond, 109–14 James, Henry, 16, 144n.41 Jancsó, Miklós, 78, 153n.39 Jusdanis, Gregory, 30, 51 Karmen, Roman, 12–13 Kaufmann, Walter, 72 and Hegel, 159n.20 and Nietzsche, 146n.58, 162n.60 Kellner, Douglas, 62 Kelly, George Armstrong, 30 Kotcheff, Ted, xxv Kotkowski, Andrzej, 60

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Hall, Stuart, 2, 103 Handke, Peter, 39 Haneke, Michael, 106–8 Hartley, Hal, 24 Hassan i Sabbah (al-Hassan ibn-alSabbaˉh) and the hashishin (Ismaili sect of Shi’a Muslims), 137 and the new propaganda, 138 and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 138–9 Hegel, G.W.F., xiv, xxvi, xxix and Adorno, 152n.24 and Aufhebung, 100, 118 and Badiou, 152n.15, 152n.23 and Baudrillard, 98 and de Certeau, 108 and influence on critical theory, 3–12 and Jabés and ‘the Jewish consciousness’, 110–11 and Marx, 120, 122 and the middle term, 75, 153n.27 and Nietzsche’s downgoing’, 18–20, 145n.51 and self-consciousness and ‘home’, 18–19, 115 and self-reflexivity, the dialectic and ‘subjective becoming’, 20, 32, 68–73, 75, 91, 115–18, 159n.20 hegemony, xii, 33, 66–7, 74 the counterhegemonic, xi, xxviii, 142n.7 and the hegemon, xiii, 2, 9, 27, 126 Heidegger, Martin and influence on Kojéve, 3 and the middle term, 71 and philosophical language, 15 and self-consciousness, language and ‘the house of being, 18–20 and ‘silence’, 99 and subjectivity and the ‘unhappy consciousness’ (Hegel), 21, 73, 91 Henry Fool (film), 24 Horkheimer, Max and Frankfurt School and critical theory, 2, 12, 144n.28

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Kristeva, Julia, 56–7, 98, 112, 151n.73, 160n.42 Kusturica, Emir, 47, 55 Lacan, Jacques, 3, 4, 65, 104, 116, 119 Last Tango in Paris (film), 17, 108 Letter to Jane (film), 35 Levi, Primo, 41, 78–81 Levinas Emmanuel, xvi, 42, 108, 148n.31 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 3, 4 Little Big Man (film), 74 Lynch, David, 83–4 Lyotard, François, 4 and the Freud’s dream work, 85, 155n.58 and ‘the jews’, 41, 101 and the ‘politics of forgetting’, 99–101 making strange, the device of (pryom ostranneniya), 123 Map of the Human Heart (film), 89–90 marginalism, xxii, xxviii, 9, 26, 44, 73, 92, 94–6, 99–101, 120, 124, 126, 133 latent marginalism, 31 manifest marginalism, 31 new marginalism, xxii, xxvii–viii, 5, 11, 20, 25, 33, 36, 81, 93, 126, 132, 138 Marker, Chris, 13, 58 Marx, Karl, 3, 5, 8, 30, 120, 143n.7 and Althusser, 64–8 and tendency (Tendenzen) and fetishism, 117–20 and Verfremdung, 156n.23 Marxism, 1, 4 neo-Marxism, 2 structuralist vs. culturalist Marxism, 1–2 Memmi, Albert, 107 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 3, 40, 88 Metz, Christian, xxvii, 116 minoritarianism, xxvi, xxi–xxii, 12, 25, 31, 38, 76, 92–4, 114, 124, 132 Mulholland Dr. (film), 83–4 Müller, Heiner, 123, 158n.66 Munich (film), 26 Munk, Andrzej, 60

Nafissi, Mohammad, 127, 129 negation of the negation (Hegel), 70, 123 negative term (other, non-identity, Hegel), 55, 69–76, 115–38 Nemeskürty, István, 154n.39 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xxvii, 8, 9, 13, 34, 44, 98, 116 and the constraints of language and ‘truth’, 146n.58, 162n.60 and ‘going down’ (Untergehen) on Hegel, 18–19, 139, 145n.52 and Zarathustra, 138–9 The Night Porter (film), 80 O’Rourke, Denis, 101 O’Rourke, P. J., xxii Our Music (film), 39–44 Pasikowski, Władisław, 53 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, xi on marginal experience, 28–30 and ‘the senses at a distance’ (Metz), 117 Penn, Arthur, 74 Percy, Walker, xx, xxiv, 70, 81, 94, 142n.32, 152n.26, 154n.54 Performance (film), 136 Polanski, Roman, 21 Poster, Mark, 143n.7, 143n.11 Pravda (film), 35 Psy (film), 53 Queenan, Joe, xxvi Robbins, Bruce, 44–7 Roeg, Nicolas, 24, 126 The Round Up (film), 78, 153n.39 Royce, Josiah, 96 Rubbo, Mike, 160n.42 Ruthrof, Horst, 63, 87–8 Said, Edward W., ix, xxi, xxiii–iv, xxix, 44, 46 and Bhabha, 133–4 and Dante and Islam as Western ‘trauma’, 125–6, 132–4 and exile, 44–5 and identity politics, 7–8, 46–7, 121

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Index

subaltern, xii–xxii, 1–2, 8–11, 35, 41, 62, 76, 90, 92–4, 117, 120, 140n.9 Subaltern Studies Group, xiii–xix Sunless (film), 58 Syriana (film), 128 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 59, 136 Terdiman, Richard, 93–4, 107–8 Thompson, E.P., 1–4, 142n.1 Todorov, Tzvetan, 4, 79–80 Todorova, Maria, 48, 57 Tran, Anh Hung, 102–3 Underground (film), 55 Vent d’est (film), 34 Verfremdungs-effekt (estrangement effect), 98, 123, 159n.26 and Marx, 156n.23 Vickery, Michael, 52, 150n.58 Wake in Fright (film), xxv Ward, Vincent, 89 West (notion of), 12–13, 22, 25, 26 Wild Side (film), 23 Žižek, Slavoj and Balibar, 54 and ‘Balkanism’, 57–9 and Handke, 39 and ‘interpassivity’, 53 and Kusturica, 55 and metaphysics, 98 and racism, 53–9, 150n.65 and the symptom, 119–20 and the ‘unanalysable Slovene’, 151n.67

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Said, Edward W. – continued and Orientalism, 7, 31, 124–8, 132 and textuality, 9, 13, 110 Salecl, Renata, and ‘fantasy structure of the homeland’, 48–51, 149n.49 and Balibar, 150n.65 and ‘Balkanism’, 50, 57 and Todorova, 57 Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (film), 117 Sartre, Jean-Paul, xxii–xvi, 4, 143n.7 and bad faith (mauvaise foi), 32, 73 Freud, 74–5, 153n.35 and metastability, 74 and ‘ontological lack’, 74 Schindler’s List (film), 42 Schneider, Gregor, 86 Shadowlands (film), 71 The Sheltering Sky (film), 88 Solzhenitsyn’s Children are Making a Lot of Noise in Paris (film), 160n.42 Spielberg, Steven, 26, 42 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, xi–xvi, xix, xxvii, 9 and Deleuze, xi–vi, xxvii, 140n.1 and Derrida, 20 and Foucault, xi–vi, xxvii, 125, 140n.1 and postmodernism, 62 and the subaltern voice, xiii, 140n.9 Stalker (film), 59, 134–6 Standard Total View (Vickery), 52 Steiner, George, 21 Stevens, George, 77, 93, 103

179