The Postcolonial Sublime The Politics of PDF
The Postcolonial Sublime The Politics of PDF
The Postcolonial Sublime The Politics of PDF
Brett Nicholls
BA (Hons) Murdoch University
i
I declare that this thesis is my own account of my research and contains as its main
content work which has not previously been submitted for a degree at any tertiary
education institution.
Brett Nicholls
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Abstract
This thesis shows how the discourse of the postcolonial disrupts the processes of
reason, the Idealism of Kant and Hegel sets forth the notion that reason, as a faculty of
mind, is forged in and through its mastery over the conscious excesses that characterise
the sublime. The necessity of the sublime in the process that established the authority of
reason, signals that reason is at once the master of its conscious domain, and yet
vulnerable, since its mastery is established in the face of the possibility of its collapse.
postcolonial. I would wish to employ the term, ‘the postcolonial sublime’, to account
the postmodern sublime, as read by Lyotard. In reading Kant, Lyotard utilises the
in itself. His work, as a consequence, fails to account for the authority of reason. In
the discourse of the postcolonial, the sublime (which is utilised to establish reason’s
conservative form is in response to a colonial desire for a global authority based upon
the principles of reason. For the discourse of the postcolonial, the sublime thus emerges
as a critical site upon which the authority of reason is written. To disrupt this authority
it is necessary, therefore, to unleash the sublime, its unpresentable excesses, from the
postcolonial sublime.
situating it in relation to key postcolonial figures such as Fanon, Bhabha, and Rushdie.
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The politics of these figures is marked in its insistence upon occupying structures of
transform the terms of such structures. The ‘postcolonial sublime’ thus emerges as a
critical term that marks this process of occupation as one in which the sublime is
wrested from its conservative trajectory, and utilised to disrupt colonial desire. The
postcolonial sublime interrupts a postmodern politics that fails to adequately account for
reason’s processes, and proposes that a more effective political strategy can begin when
reason is taken up in terms of the dynamic processes that are crucial for its authoritative
reason), and provides a useful frame for understanding the strategies that the discourse
of the postcolonial employs in order to exploit the instability that lies at the core of
reason’s processes.
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Table of Contents
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CHAPTER SIX: RUSHDIE’S POLITICS OF EXCESS __________________________________ 265
RUSHDIECRITICISM ________________________________________________________________ 266
AHMAD AND THE POLITICS OF EXCESS ________________________________________________ 274
MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN AS ESSAY ON THE POSTCOLONIAL SUBLIME _________________________ 283
A Politics of the Spittoon ________________________________________________________ 290
Contaminations, Leakages, Negotiations ____________________________________________ 301
Failures ______________________________________________________________________ 306
Connections, Border Crossings, Possibilities ________________________________________ 310
CONCLUSION: RUSHDIE’S ART _______________________________________________________ 320
NOTES _________________________________________________________________________ 329
CONCLUSION ____________________________________________________________________ 337
NOTES _________________________________________________________________________ 341
BIBLIOGRAPHY _________________________________________________________________ 342
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Acknowledgments
The debts incurred in the writing of this thesis are immense. Vijay Mishra’s belief in
me, and intellectual direction made this project possible. Horst Ruthrof provided the
inspiration to read Lyotard, and engaged me in useful discussions concerning his work.
Among others who engaged me in the discussions to which the thesis is addressed are
David Wellbourne-Wood, Debbie Rodan, Rama Venkataswarmy, Abdollah Zahiri, Lee
Kinsella, and Stephanie Donald. I am particularly indebted to my friend and colleague,
Vijay Devadas, with whom I have debated throughout my candidature. The ideas of
this thesis have been forged in productive discussions with him. I am grateful to the
staff at the Rare Book Archive at the University of Western Australia for their
assistance in locating eighteenth-century texts.
My heartfelt thanks to Jane, who has endured the pain and pleasure of thesis writing
with me. And many thanks to Josh, Zach, and Ashleigh. Your complete disregard for
the sanctity of scholarly work kept me sane.
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Preface
... world history appears to me a sublime object. The world, as an historical subject
matter, is basically nothing but the conflict of natural forces among themselves and with
Title
In contrast to the Kantian sublime, which establishes the authority of reason, the
postcolonial sublime is the unpresentable excess that remains after reason’s unifying
teleology has done its work. To establish the authority of reason, the Idealism of Kant
(and Hegel) is built upon the notion that reason, as a faculty of mind, is forged in and
through its mastery over the conscious excesses that characterise the sublime. The
necessity of the sublime in the process that established the authority of reason, signals
that reason is at once the master of its conscious domain, and yet vulnerable, since its
mastery is established in the face of the possibility of its collapse. There always already
remains in the discourse of reason’s processes an unaccounted for excess that opens up
the possibility for a politics of disruption and contamination. This extra excess opens
upon both the sublime and the postcolonial, to read one against the other. The
postcolonial cannot ‘explain’ the sublime as the sublime cannot ‘explain’ the
postcolonial. The thesis is not concerned with what is postcolonial about the sublime, if
such is possible, but with what the postcolonial does to/with the sublime. The title of
the thesis suggests that the sublime can be taken up in a different form, or more
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accurately, the Kantian sublime can be pushed beyond the conservative limits that Kant
established.
Object
The sublime is the object and the subject of the discourse of the postcolonial.
The discourse of the postcolonial takes the Kantian sublime as a conservative object and
pushes it to extremes. Whilst the sublime in Kant establishes reason’s authority, it also
marks the excessiveness of consciousness, the experiential plethora upon which reason
question mark: what if reason fails to bring unity to the experiential manifold? The
postcolonial sublime reveals what Idealism could not countenance: this failure is an
Context
aim is to bring a philosophical concern to this vast field. If it is the case, as John
Thieme puts it, that postcolonial literatures “exist at the interface of different literary
and cultural traditions” which are “hybridized; and ... ultimately trans-cultural”, I would
wish to ask: how might we understand his assertion that such a cultural
hierarchized notions of centrality”?2 In other words, how might the political effects of
of empire, and through a process of intermixing and hybridisation transform the English
canon, and the English language.3 I do not wish to take issue with this assertion upon
the surface. Rather, I would wish to draw out the nuances, the scandalous nature of the
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process of hybridisation, is that sense of transgression, the pungent political edge that
marks the hybrid in the context of (neo)colonialist sensibilities. This thesis seeks to
continue unabated,4 and signal what Christian Moraru calls “the urgency” of continual
“retooling in the wake of [the] socio-cultural and political redeployments of [the] late
Ultimately the discourse of the postcolonial looks forward by looking back. Not
convinced that colonialism is dead and buried, it seeks out its vestiges, its ghostly
century’.
up the central tenets of Idealism as a metaphor for the structure of contemporary politics
in the West. Such tenets are the object of Žižek’s indictment of the dominant discourse
Whilst it seeks to promote difference and individual interest, it actually becomes the
‘new’ master narrative through which the myth of nation is imagined. In other words,
multiculturalism upon the surface promotes the racial and cultural particular, and
suggests that cultural ‘roots’ are valid, but is a strategy that subordinates the particular
under the universal. Multiculturalism, Žižek tells us, “conceals the fact that the subject
is already thoroughly ‘rootless’, that his true position is the void of universality”. As a
strategy of concealment, multiculturalism thus diverts attention away from the myth of
nation and its Capitalist logic, and focuses upon the issue of cultural difference. As a
consequence, Žižek explains, “the basic homogeneity of the capitalist system remains
intact”.6
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If we follow Žižek, it is the case that contemporary conservative politics replays
what is a central problem for Idealism: the possibility of subordinating the particular
under the universal. The postcolonial sublime takes up this conservatism, the claim to
have united the particular as excess under the banner of the universal myth of nation,
and reveals the impossibility of this process. As framed by the thesis, the discourse of
the postcolonial is thus endowed with a pungent political edge, one that disrupts,
Pretext
Lyotard’s theory of differend and Homi Bhabha’s much used notion of hybridity. In the
context that I have imagined, each is concerned with the politics of excess, the too much
cultural meaning that resists being subordinated to a single rule. They question the
terms in which universalist systems are drawn up. My original plan was to connect
Lyotard’s differend with Bhabha’s hybridity, to utilise one in order to explain the other.
But I found that Lyotard and Bhabha could not be reduced to the order of the same. I
was thus forced to consider each in his own terms in the context of what I perceive is
the increasing momentum of a conservative politics in the West. In this thesis I take up
This Thesis
by taking up the Kantian sublime and its role in establishing the authority of reason.
And, in situating the Kantian sublime in relation to key postcolonial figures such as
Fanon, Bhabha, and Rushdie, the thesis will chart the political pungency of the
discourse of the postcolonial. What is crucial is that these key postcolonial figures
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occupy structures of conservative authority to exploit reason’s vulnerable moments.
discourse of the postcolonial, and establishes a link between its architecture and the
incomprehensible and disturbing space within the authority of the metropolitan centre.
Chapter two begins the task of mapping the postcolonial sublime. I undertake a
reading of Kant’s architectonic system in terms of the location of the sublime within it,
and connect the nuances of the Kantian sublime to the European desire for global
centrality. The problematic that inhabits Kant coincides with this desire for centrality.
Through an engagement with Gordon Bennett’s painting, I argue that the European
desire for centrality is the object of postcolonial disruption, and (paradoxically) that the
processes utilised to establish this centrality also provides the basis for such disruption.
Chapter three outlines the first stage of the terms of such a postcolonial critique.
I take up Hegel’s dissatisfaction with Kantian thought, in order to further establish the
European desire for centrality, and then turn to Fanon’s complex engagement with
critique of Kant, and the philosophical system that he constructs, there emerges a
vulnerability that Fanon exploits. The Kantian sublime with its noble intentions is
Having located Fanon’s critical position in relation to Idealism, the thesis takes a
short detour in Chapter four to consider the postmodern sublime as set forth by Lyotard.
sublime. I argue that the discourse of the postcolonial cannot be understood in terms of
the postmodern sublime, as read by Lyotard. In reading Kant, Lyotard utilises the
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sublime as a site of radical indeterminacy that opens up the “possibility of possibility”
in itself. His work, as a consequence, fails to account for the authority of reason.
Chapter five turns back to the postcolonial sublime. I take up the work of Homi
Bhabha critically in order to open up the important location of the postcolonial sublime
within it. Bhabha’s discursive concerns seek to disrupt the authority of reason by
unleashing the sublime from its shackles. In tracing Bhabha’s infrastructures I show
how a politics of excess plays a crucial role in the disruptive capacity of the
is that his work seeks to open up a transgressive material desire in the discursive
domain.
work, Midnight’s Children, and the critical concerns that have been drawn up around
literary model, that either denounces or celebrates his work on the basis of its
complicity in the myth of a heroic literature. I contend that his work resists at every turn
the romantic model that dominates Rushdiecriticism. I then turn to Aijaz Ahmad’s
Midnight’s Children in order to chart the political possibilities that Rushdie opens up.
Finally the chapter takes up Rushdie as artist, and with his own statements concerning
the public necessity of the artist in mind, I theorise his work and its disturbances in
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Author
promotes that yet-to-be-decided feeling that has led me to the sublime. The thesis
— incompleteness has been considered an enemy that urgently needs to be done away
with. The thesis seeks to interrupt the structures of the necessity of this expulsion, in
Notes
1
Friedrich von Schiller, On the Sublime, trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Frederick
Ungar Publishing, 1966), 206-207.
2
John Thieme, ed. The Arnold Anthology of Post-colonial Literatures in English
(London: Arnold, 1996), 4.
3
For a provocative articulation of this point, see Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and
Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995),
7.
4
See for instance Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Post-colonial Theory, India,
and the Mystic (London: Routledge, 1999); Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism
(London: Routledge, 1998); Dennis Walder, Post-colonial Literatures in English:
History, Language, Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); Chris Bongie, Islands and
Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literatures (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1988); Bruce King, ed. New National and Post-colonial Literatures:
An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Susan Bassett, Harish
Trivedi, ed. Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 1998).
5
Christian Moraru, “Refiguring the Postcolonial: The Transnational Challenges”, Ariel:
A Review of International English Literature, vol. 28, no. 4 (1997), 171.
6
Slavoj Žižek, “Multiculturalism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism”,
New left Review, 225 (1997), 44, 46.
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Chapter One
With what appears to be many entrances and exits, the term ‘postcolonial’ can
staircases, seemingly infinite rooms, and cracked leaky walls. As Omar in Rushdie’s
Shakil mansion found the mansion’s seeming infiniteness terrifying — the organisation
of its contents did not seem to follow established rules and principles — in many ways
‘postcolonial’ remains elusive and unfamiliar. Indeed one walks into this critical terrain
upon an old worn carpet that has been trodden upon by a disparate host of theorists,
writers and activists. And with the haunting sounds of the ghosts of the colonial past,
the theorist of the postcolonial must struggle in self-conscious spaces that are uncertain,
postcolonial self (to tentatively name a few) — remain obscure. As Stephen Slemon
positions, professional fields, and critical enterprises”. The term evokes a sense of
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residency for a third-world intellectual cadre; as the inevitable underside of a
of ‘reading practice’.1
Thus well worn questions concerning the legitimacy of critical discussions that utilise
the term, and the ‘reality’ of its referents, always already inhabit such undertakings.
The term and its referents are seemingly always in dispute. This is why a critical self-
write is not only to deal with specificities, it is to be drawn into much larger structures
of similarity and difference. Contemporary theory obeys the logic of what T. S. Eliot
called “tradition”. “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone”, Eliot
declares, “you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead”.2 We can
add the living too. From this compulsion to contrast and compare there seems to be no
escape.
The difficulty that I have suggested marks the term can also be attributed to the
term’s relative newness on the critical scene. And without a master text (no
‘Architext’), though clearly there are key figures, ‘postcolonial’ as a critical term
appears as a recent arrival upon what is in many respects a well established critical
terrain: the interrogations of Idealism and Humanism that began in the works of Marx,
Freud, and Nietzsche. For many critics this ‘lateness’ and lack of a coherent centre is a
sign of critical incompleteness, even naivety. Indeed, as Jasper Goss, lending some
sagacity to the term, puts it, “postcolonial analysis require[s] a thorough reworking
before postcolonialism can be used for radical and progressive projects”. The basis for
2
this assertion lies less with political motivation than with the “theoretical vagaries”, that,
as consequence of this overly full signifier, give rise to a “lack of clarity”.3 In the wake
of such critiques ‘postcolonial’ can be read as an eager but naive migrant, who has
term, can be characterised in a much more productive manner. It seems to me that the
discussions that it has provoked, and continues to provoke, signal that crucial issues
concerning the social and political formations of the late Twentieth Century are being
None of the Subaltern Studies scholars is anything less than a critical student of
Karl Marx, for example, and all of them have been influenced by many varieties
and Louis Althusser is evident, along with the influence of British and American
Whilst Goss deplores what for him are ‘theoretical vagaries’, Said locates the exponents
of ‘postcolonial’ in a dynamic field of practices and ideas. What is striking is Said’s use
Subaltern Studies, “what we have here”, he contends, “is the sharing of a paradigm,
rather than slavish copying”.5 ‘Postcolonial’ can thus be understood as a term upon
which several analytical and political strategies and concerns converge. Despite its
3
“astounding built-in heterogeneity”,6 to borrow a phrase from Moraru, the term belongs
intellectual life that defines itself, antagonistic or otherwise, in relation to, what could be
called, an imperial consciousness. As such the discourses that employ ‘postcolonial’ are
Postcolonial Disputes
‘Postcolonial’ is a word that engenders even more debate than ‘colonial’, in part
because of the ambiguous relation between these two. I shall refer to postcolonial
the colonial era. The first is an object of empirical knowledge — new flags fly,
new political formations come into being. The second is both an intellectual
project and a transcultural condition that includes, along with new possibilities,
Two important issues emerge here. The first concerns the initial tide of the political
dismantling of the world’s Empires after the second World War. The devastation of the
War upon Europe,8 as Hobsbawm contends, “fatally damaged the old colonialists”. In
the context of the strong momentum of the independence movements in the colonies,
the impact of War signalled “that white men and their states could be defeated,
national unity, the victories of the war ironically rendered “the old colonial powers ...
4
too weak ... to restore their old positions”.9 The war revealed an economic and psychic
vulnerability, one that the old colonial powers were forced to deal with. Unable to
continue along the lines the empire had charted, the old colonial powers altered the
written. Clearly the impact of the war altered the destination of Europe. But the
question of the power of the West and its relation to the former colonies remains far
from settled. It may be that new strategies of advantage have perniciously been called
forth. Thus whilst debates concerning the formation of nation-states are drawn up in
the independent national status of the former colonies, in the light of the changing
his Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, the problem of the nationalisms of the
former colonies stems from the alliance of Enlightenment reason, capitalism, and native
elites.12 Whilst the native elites successfully contested the West’s assumed authority
and its civilising mission (anti-colonialism), they failed to dislodge Western reason’s
Enlightenment rationalism’, India was catapulted onto the global economic arena.
Nehru’s Congress, for Chatterjee, effectively assumed the status of a player upon the
to negotiate and accommodate global capitalism. Forged in and through a desire to take
up the status that global capitalism promises, to adopt, as Chatterjee puts it, “the
distinctively modern, or 20th century, way of looking at history and society”,13 there
5
thus remains unresolved tensions between ‘capital’, as represented by the state and its
complicity with the West, and ‘the people’ who have been co-opted into this complicity.
With capital as the dominating principle of the state (and increasingly so), administered
is marked by the failure of the nationalist endeavours of the formerly colonised nation-
states.15 Rather than deliver the colonies from the tyranny of the West’s power, the
former colonies plunged, through the guidance of the native elite, back into the hands of
the West. The last decade has been marked by such a disturbing irony. As Goss
insightfully writes, it has “demonstrated the failure of those projects of Third World
national liberation”. As the “‘flag raising’ reinforced the new states’ position in the
world ... their existence as nations … meant their interactions were formed and
adjudicated by the same groups they had rejected”.16 The recent Asian currency crises
reinforces Goss’ thesis. Asia’s dependence upon the West has become increasingly
marked, firstly, through the IMF, and secondly, through the notion that Asian
governments are incompetent economic managers.17 This suggests that the national
liberation struggle of the native elite in effect was a struggle waged on the coloniser’s
terms. ‘Independence’ thus became closely linked to the capacity for self-governance,
and as such, served and continues to serve as a basis for, as Chatterjee’s discerning
analysis reveals, the West merely retaining its assumed authority over the former
grappled with the implications that the failure of nationalist independence movements
have effected. The issue of failed nationalism is a moot point. It has fuelled the critical
interrogation of ‘postcolonial’ as a vagrant term, and perhaps is one of the causes of the
6
disturbing heterogeneity that marks it.18 If prominent thinkers utilise ‘postcoloniality’
refuse to abandon the political predicament of ‘Third World’ nations. Rather than take
up what Ernest Renan calls the “brutality”19 of national unity, Ahmad and others
contend that the postcolonial critique of nationalism overlooks the condition of global
capitalism as the cause of the failure of national liberation struggles. Among the
thinkers that offer a critique of nationalism we find the work of Homi Bhabha, who
the seizure of the ambivalent (discursive) effects of localised colonial authority. And
class, and gender differences, and also in foregrounding the problem of political
legitimation, accounts for the irreducible figure of the subaltern woman, who occupies a
cultural space that can be neither excluded from, nor represented in the discourse of the
nation (Spivak is thus at odds with Bhabha).20 Among the opponents to such a critique
we find Aijaz Ahmad. Contra Bhabha and Spivak, Ahmad contends that the
postmodernist and poststructuralist theoretical positions, that have been taken up in the
postcolonial critique of nationalism, in effect mean that the impact of colonialism can
colonialism”, he contends, “is one of evacuating the very meaning of the word and
dispersing that meaning so wide that we can no longer speak of determinate structures
such as that of the postcolonial state, the role of the state in reformulating the compact
between the imperialist and the national capitals, the new but nationally differentiated
labour regimes, legislations, cultural complexes, etc.”.21 Similarly, Dirlik argues that the
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current status of both postcolonial theory since the 1980s, and its main protagonists
upon the academic scene, are directly related to shifts in the nature of global capitalism.
This is a moment in which, he writes, “for the first time in the history of capitalism …
the capitalist mode of production [finds itself] divorced from its historically specific
history of Europe; non-European capitalist societies now make their own claims on the
fragmentation” that bears more than a casual resemblance to the central premises of
postmodernism. The postcolonial, for Dirlik, refuses to consider itself in terms of this
global capitalist condition. It thus “is designed to avoid making sense of the current
These disputes obviously draw upon and engage in what has been a central
materialism on the academic left for some decades. The critical interrogations of
postcoloniality by Ahmad and Dirlik, that I have outlined, draw upon the
postcolonial analysis.23 As such the tenuous link between the postmodern and the
the nation-states of the former colonies, the issue of the validity of the ‘post’ in
It is not my intention to deal directly with these debates (though the thesis takes
up the possibilities that Bhabha’s work affords). It will suffice to say that Dirlik’s claim
the current Asian economic crises, needs to be significantly rethought. In regard to the
question of the ‘post’, I would argue that there is no reason to think that ‘post’, ‘after’,
8
as a temporal moment signifies a new radical freedom for the formerly colonised. The
thesis takes as its point of departure the notion that ‘post’, in this context, signifies that
there has been an historical shift in the relations of power between the coloniser and the
colonised that demands new modes of critical thinking. As Prakash usefully puts it,
postcoloniality marks “a new beginning, one in which certain old modes of domination
may persist and acquire new forms of sustenance, but one that marks the end of an
era”.26 I would wish to locate the scope and aim of this thesis in relation to this shifting
terrain. My position on the postcolonial and the postmodern will thus become evident
in due course.
To move onto Spurr’s second point, in the wake of the dismantling of empire, a
emergent nation-states, produced large scale migration. The contemporary world is thus
transplanting”.27 I would wish to contend that this problematic, one that increasingly
disturbs the efficacy of Western nationalism, is one of the most urgent issues of our
We are seeing signs that the privilege given to natural languages and, as it were,
transience — where American clothes made in Korea are worn by young people
in Russia, where everyone’s ‘roots’ are in some degree cut — in such a world it
9
becomes increasingly difficult to attach human identity and meaning to a coherent
‘culture’ or ‘language’.28
In the context of the failure of nationalism, and the debates that this has effected,
the nation-state. If, as Poole succinctly puts it, “Nationalism comes on the scene when
the idea that a people is constituted as a political community through a shared cultural
identity enters political discourse, and a large (enough) number of people come to
believe that this identity takes priority over others”,29 then clearly the ambiguous
nationalism of the former colonies, migrants, and the culturally displaced, in spite of
states. To continue with Spurr, the postcolonial self emerges in that difficult space
between possibility and crises. Rather than an existential problem, this space opens up
colonisers are forced to deal with the First World now appearing in the Third (South
Korea, sections of Bombay and Santiago) while the Third World grows in the first (Los
Angeles, Brixton and outer Paris),30 the monolithic national myths that hover over the
Thus far the disputes that draw the muddy term ‘postcolonial’ into their critical
orbit, seem, as Spurr’s succinct definition reveals, to employ the term as the political
goal to move beyond and outside colonialism. This goal, as Chatterjee shows, has been
tainted by the failure of nationalist liberation projects to usher in the new freedoms that
their strategies promised. Conversely, the term also describes the condition of
utilised as both a project and a condition. The former relates, seemingly, to the former
colonies and their relationships with the West. The latter relates to the West, or at least
10
to the Western ideals that arise as obstacles to immigrants to the West, and those that
have found it difficult to be inscribed into the nationalisms of the former colonies.
Central in both undertakings of the term, is the notion that fixity, or the unity that is
and philosophy. In order to chart what is at stake in the discourse of the postcolonial,
With this emphasis upon what I have called the fixity of Western national,
cultural, and philosophical forms in mind, I would wish, at this point, to chart some of
the key figures and ideas that have contributed to the formation of ‘postcolonial’ as a
prominent critical term. I will begin with the Subaltern Studies group, which placed the
Subaltern Studies
Gayatri Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and others, have critically contested imperialist
was the meta-narrative of the modern state. If the British plotted Indian pasts in
imperialist struggles in India as steps towards a sovereign state, a state that would
one day stand on the very foundations that the imperialists themselves had laid.
The life of the people was thus subsumed within a hallowed biography ! which
11
The central aim of Subaltern Studies is to open up the possibility of transforming the
Subaltern theory, contends that the “historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long
time been dominated by elitism — colonialist elitism and bourgeois nationalist elitism”.
This means that Subalterns have been represented (by the elite) as the simple followers
of the Indian elite’s nationalist liberation movements. Such elitism, Guha argues, “fails
to acknowledge, far less interpret, the contribution made by the people on their own,
that is, independently of the elite to the making and development of this nationalism”.32
Gyan Prakash explains, Subaltern Studies “seeks to undo the Eurocentrism produced by
the institution of the West’s trajectory, its appropriation of the other as History”.33 This
means that rather than take up, what could be considered, conventional critical tools in
dislocating the Other from the Eurocentric narrative order in which the Other had
already been located. Despite some Subaltern scholars’ scepticism concerning the
capacity of postmodern and poststructuralist forms of analysis, the strength of this work
lies in its capacity to problematise, and to question the very terms of such a critique of
replay the negative effects of the European and Indian elite’s imagination upon the
For Spivak the strength of Subaltern Studies lies precisely in its foregrounding
of, what she calls, the ‘problem of Subaltern consciousness’. Whilst she concedes that
12
the group is susceptible to “recovering a consciousness ... within the post-Enlightenment
tradition”, she also finds another “force ... which would contradict such a metaphysics”.
What Spivak points to, in this regard, is a situated, material notion of consciousness, for
since “the texts of counter-insurgency locate ... a ‘will’ [of the people] as the sovereign
Studies thus seeks to disrupt the elitist assumption that the texts of counter-insurgency
are effects of the subaltern as subject. It assumes the reverse to be the case. But this
reversing gesture does not pave the way for Realism: ‘this is what the will of the
Subaltern actually is’. Instead the relationship between the Subaltern and the texts of
of the subject as subaltern”.35 What becomes crucial is the disjunction between subject
and Subaltern that Spivak’s formulation foregrounds. The two are not necessarily
Subalternity. There is more to the Subaltern than the discourse on and of the Subaltern
Edward Said
theory. Perhaps the most significant reworking of Foucault’s discourse analysis, the
work interrogates the category ‘Orient’, specifically the political effects of its discursive
construction through Orientalist scholarship. Said contends that rather than objective
13
East/West. The West defined its civility in relation to an orientalist other, who
embodied all that the West was not: irrational, war mongering, devious, lazy, sadistic,
oversexed degenerate, slave trader etc. As “an accepted grid for filtering through the
interchanges between the West and the West’s perceived others. This structuring of the
West’s relation to the Orient allowed for the West’s “flexible positional superiority,
which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient
seeks to define and disrupt the structure of the East/West binary. He asserts:
we need not look for correspondence between the language used to depict the
Orient and the Orient itself, not so much because the language is inaccurate but
because it is not even trying to be accurate. What it is trying to do, as Dante tried
to do in the Inferno, is at one and the same time to characterize the Orient as alien
mechanism that claims to tell its subjects who they are. Said thus mounts an
discursive knowledge of the Orient that is quoted (almost) endlessly from writer to
writer, Orientalism emerges as less an exact science in the service of imperialism than a
system of tropes repeated constantly until it reaches canonical status and becomes
14
What we are left with as a consequence of Said’s critical epistemology is a more
general moment in which the task of writing culture is problematised. The work implies
that representations of culture can only be fictions. This means that a self-reflexive
whereby the political positioning of the writer in relation to the object of study is
critically examined as part of the work, and constantly brought into question.
Homi Bhabha
The work of Homi Bhabha also occupies another important place in the
would emphasise, for example, class, Bhabha seizes subjectivity in terms of cultural
location and psyche in order to alter the destination of discussions on colonial discourse.
their history and experience. ... Postcolonial and black critiques propose forms of
contestatory subjectivities that are empowered in the act of erasing the politics of
binary opposition.38
15
This emphasis upon the temporal moment, the instant in which identity is played out,
“the production of the nation as narration there is a split between the continuist,
sly civility, subalternity, translation, and time lag, in order to foreground the complexity
of colonial discourse. As his stated aim reveals, his work draws upon, what is
considered, the (local) location of selves, that is to say the temporal moment in which
the performative (the self as agent) puts the pedagogic (the nation’s claim to tell its
citizens who they are) into doubt. Thus, with this emphasis upon the temporal and the
local as the site in which identity is played out, Bhabha challenges universal notions
located in and against the colonial, rather than as a project that seeks to formulate the
possibility of a condition beyond and outside colonial discourse, as is the case with Said
and the Subaltern studies group (for instance, Spivak’s strategic essentialism).
Crucially, Bhabha seizes migration as the defining trope of the time, and, unlike Said,
seeks to open up the political possibilities that migration gives rise to. Whilst the
productive split space of the pedagogic and the performative can be understood in
transcendental terms, there is a sense in which this transcendental condition’s most apt
occupants, if I can use such terms, are migrants. Since culture and politics are played
out in the relationship of the coloniser and the colonised, the nation and the citizen, the
Bhabha, intensifies the ambivalence that characterises that split space between what-
16
was-and-will-be and what-is, and opens up the performative as a politically productive
site.
Frantz Fanon
Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth have
been incisive texts for thinkers such as Said and Bhabha. Fanon’s struggle with the
— Lacan, Marx, and Hegel — have opened up a wide range of critical debates and
and an historical moment that marks a shift, as I have suggested, in the relations of
power between the former colonisers and the formerly colonised. The postcolonial
historically, “the Negro steeped in the inessentiality of servitude was set free by his
master. He did not fight for his freedom”41 — that opens up a gap between the
coloniser’s what-can-be and the colonised what-is. Crucially, in seizing the space of
what-is, Fanon reveals the impossibility of the what-can-be, and thus opens up the
necessity for finding and articulating new modes of thinking and being that exceed the
value, the jagged testimony of colonial dislocation, its displacement of time and
person, its defilement of culture and territory, refuses the ambition of any ‘total’
17
This emphasis on dislocation is set forth in many sections of Fanon’s work. One
example is articulated thus: “the fact that the newly returned Negro adopts a language
different from that of the group into which he was born is evidence of a dislocation, a
original state, and demands the task of, in his more humanistic moments, of finding new
modes of thinking and being, and in his more critical moments, opening up the political
possibilities of the performative in order to disrupt the dialectical basis of the pedagogic
apparatus. I will deal specifically with the performative disruptions of Fanon in chapter
three.
Despite the differences that can be seen between these key thinkers, this
postcolonial archive (of sorts) constitutes the tenuous framework of what could be
called the discourse of the postcolonial. Several important consistencies can be found.
Firstly, each undertaking attempts a radical critique of Western hegemony in its various
and ghettoization and to insist rigorously that their internal perspective is equally
Secondly, such interventions call forth crucial questions: How can such a
legitimacy? In what could be called the postcolonial problematic, these questions are
less ontological than fluid sites that continually open up possibility. Caught between
the possibility of constituting a politically legitimate speaking subject and the necessary
18
that entails a productive failure. Against reproducing the representational strategies of
colonialism, that are, as Said asserts, “always governed by some version of the truism
that if the Orient could represent itself, it would; since it cannot, the representation does
the job, for the West, and faute de mieux, for the poor Orient”, postcolonial critical
representation”.45 Thus rather than close down debate in the name of an essential,
‘higher’ truth (Ontology), ‘postcolonial’ comes to the fore through the notion that its
Thirdly, the discourses of the postcolonial draw the complex relationship of the
former colonisers and formerly colonised world into questions of identity and agency.
This is an issue I would wish to pursue at length. Two crucial moments (that contradict
each other perfectly) can be charted. The first challenges the notion that colonialism
can be understood simply as the imposition of a dominant culture upon an empty native
postcolonialist studies takes as a premise that the cultures and psyches of the
colonizer were not already defined, and only waiting, as it were, to be imposed,
fully formed, on the hapless victims of the colonial project. ... the postcolonialist
contention is that what was involved was an even more complex intertwining of
were played off were not only outside but also inside the nation-states of the
centre.46
19
The ‘intertwining’ suggested in Rattansi’s thesis cannot be taken to mean that the
coloniser and the (post)colonised are somehow equal contenders on a level field of play.
What is at issue here is the political nature of this ‘intertwining’. If colonised selves,
from the perspective of the colonisers, can be located in what could be called a space
outside-inside Europe, resistance to, and the nature of, colonial dominance must be
understood, in its most basic form, through the trope of Hegelian ‘mutual dependence’:
the colonial self is defined in relation to the native as a radically different Other.
scales and with varying political bearings, the two processes should nonetheless be
Thus rather than the mutual dependence that lies at the core of the ‘intertwined’ former
coloniser and former colonised of Rattansi, Moraru contends that this relationship can
also be staged as a much more oblique and politically disruptive one. ‘Parallel
spaces outside and beyond the mutual recognition that is implicit in the ‘intertwined’
metaphor. What Moraru opens up is the possibility of thinking of the colonisers and
20
incommensurability and agonism, rather than antagonism or consensus. I would
contend, along with Moraru, who explains that the ‘Orientalising of Europe’ has been
staged ‘on different scales and with varying political bearings’, that the possibility of
as a disturbing threat to the authority of the colonial. Such disturbances are less
cultural excesses that disrupt the structural terms of that authority. In this regard,
expressed through the myth of nationalist unity, thus contends not just with the
disrupt the assumed ‘fixity’ of the colonisers, is not as politcally pungent as is claimed.
Rattansi assumes that Western reason, which is the bedrock of fixity, always already
proceeds from a fixed base, a unified epistemological and moral self, and then proceeds
to impose that self upon the native as Other, or at least constructs itself in relation to the
native as Other. To disrupt this process is thus to disrupt the possibility of fixity. But
Western reason may be much more dynamic than Rattansi presupposes. This is a
crucial issue. It seems to me that the unity of Western reason is a process, rather than a
pre-given site from which knowledge and social action proceed. I will pursue this issue
in chapters that deal with Kantian and Hegelian thought. If as I have suggested the
postcolonial cannot look away from the horror of the colonial past, it is necessary to
chart what it is that the postcolonial looks at. I would wish to contend that it is in this
return to the colonial past that the cogency of the discourse of the postcolonial begins.
It is through Moraru’s model that the disruptive possibilities of the postcolonial can be
charted. Rather than mutual dependence, which does not seem to be a serious problem
21
for Western reason, Moraru evokes slippages and excesses, points of uncertainty that
expose and exploit reason’s vulnerability. How might this vulnerability be thought? I
would wish to suggest that in order to engage in this question we need to turn to the
wavering, of the time of politics, as a way of reframing what I would wish to call the
This thesis can be located in this difficult problematic. In the parallel relation of
the coloniser and the (formerly) colonised migrant the postcolonial sublime can be
staged. As a moment in the ebb and flow of global capital, as postcolonial nationalisms
emerges as a threat to the processes of the Western imagination. In what Anderson calls
peripheries in the New World or the Antipodes but inwards toward the metropolitan
the literary and the political implications of Anderson’s observation. Thus as Anderson
interestingly charts this experience from the perspective of the nation-state, rather than
in terms of questions of agency and identity, as the formulation suggests, I seek to prise
open the figure of the migrant that appears here as both a necessity and a disruption to
pessimistically contends:
22
in general, today’s long-distance nationalism strikes one as a probably menacing
politics that is at the same time radically unaccountable. ... Third, his politics,
unlike those activists for global human rights or environmental causes, are neither
intermittent nor serendipitious. They are deeply rooted in a consciousness that his
exile is self-chosen and that the nationalism he claims on E-mail is also the
In addition to a lamentable capitalist global order, we can hear what for Anderson is a
problem of setting the limits of the migrants’ connection to homeland. The violence
that is implicit in the extremist nationalism that Anderson writes about allows us to nod
in accord with his conclusions. But at the edges of this thought the figure of the migrant
emerges as a problematic figure. The problem of belonging ‘here’ and speaking for
‘elsewhere’, speaking, as it were, free from the limits of accountability, is the center
piece of Anderson’s argument. Rather than affirming what is for many a liberating
23
from its dark bed: the road from Putney Hill
of Bombay.50
One can only conclude that the free flow of information, as embodied in the figure of
the migrant, across national boundaries disrupts the homogeneous national form as set
In the context of the ‘First World’s’ increasing dependence on the economic and
figurative status of the ‘Third World’, in its constructions of its own economic and
national identities, what Anderson pessimistically opens up are questions concerning the
overtones of Anderson’s argument mean that migrancy always already signals a bleak
of myths of the nation, its disruption, is the very thought that prevails in uses of
‘postcolonial’, though in affirmative tones. But what exactly is being disrupted? How
does this seeming disruption figure in the context of the Enlightenment thought of
In Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses we find two possibilities concerning the figure
goat represents the first. The image of Gibreel Farishta as migrant conqueror is the
second. What is at stake here is the question of the social meaning of the figure of the
migrant as monster. I would contend that two different versions emerge. The first is the
articulation of the relation of the migrant to the host nation. The second is much more
24
incomprehensible entity. Such an incomprehensibility leads us the postcolonial
sublime. I will take up the first migrant image through the work of Franco Morreti, and
then I will explore a much more disturbing image of the migrant through the work of
Todorov and Kristeva. In my attempt to theorise the political cogency of the discourse
of the postcolonial, I would wish to take up Moraru’s parallel model. I contend that
such a model suggests that there is ‘something happening’ in the relationship of the
coloniser and the colonised that a dialectic of self-consciousness cannot wholly account
for. It is this ‘something happening’ that this thesis seeks to explore. As I will show,
would wish to call the postcolonial sublime. The following reframes Ratttansi’s and
Moraru’s formulations of the postcolonial, and suggests why Moraru’s model needs to
be taken up.
In his discussion on the social meaning of the monstrous Other, Franco Morretti
draws upon Marx and Freud to interpret Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula as
mythical reproductions of economic, social, and sexual fears. We can draw Saladin’s
capitalists and the proletariat. As an object of fear, “born precisely out of terror of split
society, and out of the desire to heal it”, Frankenstein’s monster can be read in the same
breath as ‘Ford worker’. “Like the proletariat”, Morretti writes, “the monster is denied
a name and an individuality ... he belongs wholly to his creator ... he is a collective and
artificial creature ... not found in nature, but built”. This desire for the ‘containment’
wife. The possibility of the thriving marginalised community that is implied in the
monster’s demand is an unbearable nightmare for the scientist and, by extension, the
25
capitalists. The image of the proletariat as a “‘race of devils’” thus “encapsulates”,
Morretti asserts, “one of the most reactionary elements in Mary Shelley’s ideology”.
The monster “once transformed into a ‘race’ ... re-enters the immutable realm of
longings.52
Dracula, on the other hand, represents both the threat of the ‘blood-suckers’ of
monopoly capitalism and the fear of the figure of the castrating mother. “In Britain”
Morretti explains, “at the end of the nineteenth century, monopolistic concentration was
far less developed ... than in other advanced capitalist societies”. Monopoly capital is
“something extraneous to British history ... a foreign threat”. Dracula as the figure of
advantageous for all: “money that refuses to become capital, that wants not to obey the
crushing foreign ideology, and justifies British capitalism. For Morretti this
difficult to admit and face its own fears. Thus the subliminal meanings of Dracula as
metaphor are “subordinated to the literal presence of the murderous count. They can be
expressed only if they are hidden ... by his black cloak”.54 It is under this sinister cloak
that Marx and Freud converge, for ultimately Dracula represents not just monopoly
capital but also the repressed Victorian libido that threatens the stability of the
Morretti’s thesis concerning the social meaning of the literary monster advances
the notion: “it is fear one needs: the process one pays for coming contentedly to terms
with a social body based on irrationality and menace”.55 What is striking in this
26
formulation is the ‘contentedness’ of the process of dealing with the objects of social
fears. Rather than radical disruptions, the monster for Morretti functions ideologically.
proletariat. We can thus read Rushdie’s utilisation of the trope of the monstrous as
migrant, the narrative tension between the postcolonial migrant and his imagined ‘host’
culture, and the ‘resolution’ of that tension (albeit an open one) — Saladin overcomes
his monstrous form through anger, and is able to begin to deal with the homeland from
which he was trying to escape — we can read the outworking of this monstrous trope,
its foregroundedness, as a critique of the conservative uses of the figure of the monster
conservative ideology.
In another literary setting, Jameson also explains the social meaning of the
master and slave relationship, Jameson’s argument concerning the figure of the
Evil ... continues to characterize whatever is radically different from me, whatever
by virtue of precisely that difference seems to constitute a real and urgent threat to
my own existence. So from the earliest times, the stranger from another tribe, the
customs, but also the woman, whose biological difference stimulates fantasies of
resentments from some oppressed class or race, or else that alien being, Jew or
27
figures of the Other, about whom the essential point to be made is not so much
If we bend this accent upon the radically ‘other’ as evil toward the figure of the
monstrous migrant, this radical otherness has a social function that equates to the
contented transformations of the economic, social, and sexual fears that we found in
Morretti. The figure of the migrant as the incarnation of evil, like Morretti’s monster, is
necessary for establishing the boundaries of the psycho-social bond. This means that
we can read the situated monstrous Saladin Chamcha as a necessary moment in the
construction of British identity. Rushdie’s text bears this out. In that moment in which
national identity became an urgent issue, despite his anxious cry to the British police,
unbelonging is confirmed by his monstrous body. “‘If it’s proof you’re after”, the
police proclaim, “you couldn’t do better than those.’ ... there at his temples, growing
longer by the moment, and sharp enough to draw blood, were two new, goaty,
unarguable horns”.57 Saladin, the model colonial subject, thus ironically emerges not
through the unthinkable, the unspeakable, the unnameable trope of the sublime, but as
the essentialised, contained Other, the basis for the you’re-not-one-of-us of the equally
Jameson and Morretti thus present useful literary models for dealing with the
social implications of the figure of the monster. But Rushdie’s text does not remain
content with such formulations. It demands that we move beyond the dialectics of
Morretti and Jameson. Significantly, Chamcha as goat poses no real ‘threat’ to English
28
threatening or scandalous: “this supernatural imp — was being treated by the others as
if it were the most banal and familiar matter they could imagine”.58 Whilst the
monstrous Saladin represents the wholly Other, that self that is drawn into a dialectic of
mutual dependence, a far more threatening other, who cannot be reduced to the order of
mutual recognition emerges at the edge of the narrative action. As Saladin remonstrated
with the police, Gibreel Farishta “came downstairs in a maroon smoking jacket and
stood on the first-floor landing and observed the proceedings without comment”.59 As
the scene’s marginal figure, Gibreel represents that ‘other’ more threatening migrant
moment. His unnoticed hybridity, his silence and elevated gaze, can be understood only
dialectical situatedness.
I would contend that Gibreel’s disturbing presence at the edge of this scene can
be read in terms of what I have called Moraru’s parallel model. Gibreel’s fantastic
arrival on the British beach, for instance, is articulated through the trope of the migrant
‘Rise ‘n’ shine! Let’s take this place by storm.’ Turning his back on the sea,
blotting out the bad memory in order to make room for the next things, passionate
as always for newness, he would have planted (had he owned one) a flag, to claim
Thus instead of the confrontation that is entailed in the figure of the monster as Other,
we find the scandal of transculturation, the notion that the postcolonial migrant can be
constituted as both an ‘other’ that marks the edge of Western civility, and a threat to the
29
The scandal of transculturation as it emerges in the figure of Gibreel can be
understood in terms of what Todorov has called the fantastic. He explains the fantastic
as follows.
In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know, a world without devils,
laws of this same familiar world. The person who experiences the event must opt
for one of two solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a
product of imagination — and laws of the world then remain as they are; or else
the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality — but then this
What of the effect of Gibreel’s marginal location in the scene? We find this hesitation
that marks the fantastic, that moment in which the self is forced to decide what
constitutes reality.
Hisser Moaner Popeye turned eagerly towards Gibreel. ‘And who might this
But the words died on his lips, because at that moment the floodlights were
switched off, the order to do so having being given when Chamcha was
handcuffed and taken in charge, and in the aftermath of the seven suns it became
clear to everyone there that a pale, golden light was emanating from the direction
of the man in the smoking jacket, was in fact streaming softly outwards from a
point immediately behind his head. Inspector Lime never referred to that light
again, and if he had been asked about it would have denied ever seeing such a
thing, a halo, in the late twentieth century, pull the other one.62
30
The confused Inspector Lime experiences the momentary hesitation that marks the
fantastic in his encounter with the figure of the postcolonial migrant in English garb. It
is this crucial momentary uncertainty that is missing from Morretti’s and Jameson’s
accounts of the figure of the monster. In similar terms, the mutual dependence that is at
the core of Rattansi also lacks Inspector Lime’s hesitation. I would contend that such a
momentary hesitation the processes of reason’s stability are able to be brought into
question. In the postcolonial context, the opening up of the space of the question is the
moment in which a politics begins. The fantastic Todorov explains, “occupies the
duration of this uncertainty”. The fantastic exposes the fragility of the limit between
matter and mind. It is “that hesitation” that calls an assumed stability into question.63
necessitate and foreground the fragility of the limits of Western being. In order to
account for such a politics it will be necessary to turn to the sublime, that trope that has
contention that this necessary play upon the limits of (Western) being signals that
Western authority, whilst this play is necessary, is always already vulnerable. It is this
vulnerability that is crucial. I would wish to explore its structure. In exploiting the
sublime and the possibilities that it opens up, the discourse of the postcolonial disrupts
Unsettling Kant
How might the ‘something happens’, that fantastic moment that I have suggested
marks the political cogency of Moraru’s parallel model be theorised? I would suggest
that in order to deal with this question, it is necessary to begin with Kant’s influential
31
Critique of Judgement, and his notion of the sublime.64 For Kant the sublime presents
itself in that moment in which the imagination — which functions in terms of space
and time — is confronted by an object that is too large to express, too overpowering to
suspension of Reason, so that the Ideas — Reason’s ultimate faculty — can furnish the
mind with a concept that is able to grasp what is essentially ungraspable. I turn to this
eighteenth-century formulation of the sublime, because I find that the issue of the myth
of nation is a vital part of its processes. In the context of the emerging capitalist
expansion of the Eighteenth Century, this capacity of the mind to present the
and Europe’s assumed authority upon the global stage. What is essentially a
philosophical problem in Kant — the possibility of the unity of the self — becomes the
trope of European elitism. The possibility of the collapse of the self (the failure of the
imagination), and the establishment of the capacity of the self to ‘overcome’ that
global superiority. Thus whilst the European self of Kant teeters on the brink of
collapse, the capacity to negotiate such a predicament, to achieve the unity of the
conscious self, signals what was considered to be the greatness of Europe. The
European emerges as a tightrope walker, defying the destructive dangers that lurk
beneath.
What this teetering suggests is that the ‘something happens’ of Moraru’s parallel
anxious concerning the foundations for these accomplishments. Moraru’s model draws
32
The resonances that surround the anxiousness of the self have furnished Europe
with the tools to lay a claim to the virtues of national unity. In this typical early
twentieth century imperial formulation, James Garvin, apologist for the League of
Nations, in pointing out the remarkable achievements of the British Empire, asserts:
[humanity] can only be served through strong nations. ... ‘Humanity’ is nothing
but the individual men and women composing it, and the worth of the aggregate is
determined by the value of the units. But the soul of a whole people seems to
strengthen or decay with that sense of national vitality and national achievement
which — like the electric helix, giving energy to what was before the dead weight
of a soft iron bar — raises to a higher power the faculties of its component
individuals. ‘Humanity’ can do nothing for ‘humanity’, and races do most for
other races by the example they give and the ideals they pursue in the process of
Apart from the troubling circular logic here, at the edges of Garvin’s extolling the
collapse of the ‘I’. Garvin’s argument, which returns to the economic principles of
Adam Smith to shore up British colonial supremacy against its economic competitors,
together. It is this anxiousness, crises that can be found in all nationalisms, that
animates the beneficial outcomes of the unifying myth. Tinged with a British
nationalist spirit, in this instance, the benefits of maintaining national unity amounts to a
plug for the necessity of the cultural and economic supremacy of Britain. Thus the
confidence and surety that underpins the human benefits of national unity is a
confidence only insofar as the object of ‘decay’, which is not really an object, is in place
33
so that it can be overcome. This means that the condition of ‘decay’, as the object of
overcoming, in its mythical form is abolished in that moment in which unity is attained.
But in order to sustain the necessity of the national illusion, it can never be abolished
outright. It occupies that space at the edge of the nation, that always already sublime
threat that calls forth the national vigilance that Garvin evokes. In the sustaining myth
of the nation, ‘decay’ (read as sublime threat) is thus always already on the inside of the
In addition to what I have called the outside/inside of the sublime in the myth of
national unity, Garvin’s early twentieth century work reveals the British desire to be the
central character on the global stage. The crises that Garvin evokes in order shore up
interestingly) USA — for whom, according to Garvin, Britain had paved the way,
reveals, in the context of the logic of capital, the desire of the West to dominate the
world’s economic affairs. The animation of this desire, or at least the tools that work
hand in hand with the logic of capital, and which reveal that colonial desire is both
economic and cultural, can be found, as I have suggested, in the sublime moment. The
and on the necessity of the sublime not taking hold and spinning out of control. The
nationalism of Garvin thus evokes a vigilance concerning the disruptive capacity of the
sublime, and also a vigilance concerning the necessity of that disruptive capacity. The
sublime thus emerges as an always already threat that sustains the necessity of the myth
of the nation.
further blows that even the national tightening of belts could not overcome, what
becomes crucial for Garvin is the maintenance of a much broader Western unity. Under
the sustaining myth of impending crises, with the heading, “Co-operation or Chaos”,
34
Garvin asserts the necessity of forging a British and American “partnership” through
The League of Nations. Such a union would ensure that the world would be able to
withstand not just the impact of an historical event, such as war, but also the ever
imminent threat of what can be found at the terrifying core of being itself: “the
confusion of ideas and desires” that were unleashed “against all that is called control or
restraint ... in this outbreak of all the war-repressed impulses of the natural man” (my
emphasis).66
Thus a nauseous Garvin teeters at the edge of being’s terrifying abyss, and
Moraru suggests, and which is prefigured in Western thought, the discourse of national
Western rationalism the sublime moment can be described as that necessary and
distressing predicament that is an unpleasure for one part of the psyche and a pleasure
for another. Indeed the latter Freud of “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” found the
exists”, Freud writes, “in the mind a strong tendency towards the pleasure principle”
there are “certain other forces or circumstances” that “cannot always be in harmony
with the tendency towards pleasure” (my emphases).67 For Freud the pleasure in the
unpleasure of these ‘other forces’ suggest a governing principle, or perhaps the lack of a
governing principle ‘beyond the pleasure principle’. He thus asks, what can possibly be
gained in the repetition of unpleasure? With the dominance of the pleasure principle in
doubt, as I read it, Freud promptly set about showing how the repetition-compulsion
relates to, and is constantly reinforced by, factors governed by the pleasure principle
(whether or not the pleasure principle ultimately remains in tact is a matter of dispute).
35
children’s play, repeating “unpleasurable experiences” enables the child to “master” that
unpleasure “by being active” rather than “merely experiencing it passively”. In the
second instance, however, the repetition-compulsion evokes “an obscure fear ... with its
theoretical analysis, the constitutive dualism of the death instincts and the life
condition, what emerges as crucial is the energy and the sense of mastery that emerges
with the theoretical disruptions of the pleasure of unpleasure, Garvin returns from the
sublime, and the dynamic fort/da of culture that the discourse of the postcolonial opens
up. The abject, Kristeva tells us, as opposed to the subject and object, “has only one
quality of the object — that of being opposed to I”. Abjection is that which “disturbs
identity, system, order. ... does not respect borders, positions, rules. ... It is death
infecting life. ... the place where meaning collapses”.70 Crucially such a place inhabits,
for Kristeva, the ‘core’ of social being. In what can be read as a transcendental
condition after Kant, the abject emerges as both an intimate and necessary threat, that
There is nothing like the abjection of the self to show that all abjection is in fact
founded.72
36
The structural necessity of this moment becomes evident, as Kristeva attests, through
the figures and acts that can be located on borders of culture, and which, as a
consequence of this border condition, draw “attention to the fragility of the law”.73
The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal
with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a saviour
... [the exile who asks] ‘Where am I?’ instead of ‘Who am I?’”.74
with the sublime. Neither has a representable object, both ‘permeate’ being, and both
negate order, I, borders, and rules. But whereas the abject animates want — which
Kristeva locates beyond the unconscious: “if one imagines ... the experience of want
itself as logically preliminary to being and object ... then one understands that abjection,
and even more so abjection of self, is its only signified”75 — the sublime calls forth
In the symptom, the abject permeates me, I become abject. Through sublimation,
I keep it under control. The abject is edged with the sublime. It is not the same
moment on the journey, but the same subject and speech bring them into being.76
The move from the abject to the sublime, is thus a movement from a structural
possibilities that abjection’s disrespect for boundaries opens up. Of course for Kristeva,
rather than rationalist possibilities, the sublime opens up the mystical and the aesthetic.
37
The sublime ‘object’ dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory ... the
sublime is a something added that expands us, overstrains us, and causes us to be
impossible bounding.77
But there is another possibility. Whilst Kristeva celebrates what for Lyotard would be
the genuine sentiment of the sublime, novatio, in which the unpresentable form in itself
continually opens up new possibilities for thinking and being, Kristeva’s account of the
sublime carefully ignores the sublime’s dark side, nostalgia, in which the unpresentable
becomes an absent content.78 As the former leads us to the postmodern, the latter leads
What Lyotard’s distinction thus suggests, and this is an issue that I would wish
to take up directly, is that rationalism, and by extension the nationalism of Garvin, can
emerges as less an ontology than a particular kind of artfulness that gives shape, albeit
the sublime, Kant and his majestic architectonic system, according to Lyotard, is not
guilty of such a charge. The radical incommensurability of the faculties in Kant means
that ethics can never be reduced to the aesthetic. The sublime, that abyss between the
reading of Kant thus brackets the sublime, as an aesthetic moment, in order to celebrate,
what is perceived as Kant’s failure to reconcile freedom and necessity as the Critique of
integral component in the system. “The ‘mere appendage’ to the critical elaboration of
38
the aesthetic”, Lyotard contends, “by natural finality ... takes a menacing turn. It
indicates that another aesthetic can be not only expounded but ‘deduced’ according to
the rules of critique”.80 This deduction of the sublime, given its menacing location in
Kant’s architectonic system, becomes, for Lyotard, the most apt analogy for (re)opening
questions concerning art, justice, and politics.81 In what emerges as Kant’s cognisant
failure, the continual opening up of this failure as novatio in art, and differend in
The thesis nods in agreement with Lyotard’s call for the disruption of
totalitarianism. This is an urgent and necessary project. But the thesis questions the
theory does, that metanarratives are pre-given sites from which epistemological and
social being proceeds. I would suggest that Lyotard has overestimated the capacity of
reconcile freedom and necessity in the aesthetic domain, in the context of what I have
strategies of novatio and bearing witness to differends. This means that the
either/or, the Lyotardian sublime seems to perpetuate such terms, as I will show in
chapter four. In contrast, the discourse of the postcolonial is driven by the necessity of
39
opening up the anxiousness that lies at the core of the national project. It desires to lay
hold of the abject in order to unleash its sublime possibilities as the sublime. In other
words, rather than attempt to open up new (pure) sites, the discourse of the postcolonial
seeks to wrest the sublime from its trajectory, to contaminate its path in the structure of
Kantian reason.
I take the notion that the sublime is a threatening excess as the key concept for
the thesis. For Lyotard this excess presents two possibilities: a contained aesthetic
Lyotard assumes that the avant-garde is fascism’s opposite. I would wish to propose
another route, one that seeks to wrest the sublime from this either/or logic. I would
argue that Lyotard’s insistence upon novatio can surely be read as a gesture no less
totalising than the nostalgic demand for order.82 My contention is that if we are to
consider what kind of politics the sublime effects, it needs to be situated in the
structures of its use. The bracketing of the sublime, as in Lyotard, as an end in itself
fails to adequately engage in rationalism’s use of the sublime. To take up the failure of
Morretti’s provocative recasting of Reason as Dracula, the bloodsucker that feeds upon
the image of the monster. Just as Saladin Chamcha poses no threat, the avant-garde as a
dialectical other, can be read as an opposition that merely furnishes Reason with the
I would wish to take up the sublime as a functional trope. Rather than an end in
itself, as in Lyotard’s avant-garde, the sublime is an excess that has been put to use in
various ways, for a variety of purposes. In keeping with the tenor of its historical use, I
would wish to consider the sublime as it emerges in the service of European Reason. It
is my contention, that in order to disrupt reason the discourse of the postcolonial seizes
40
the sublime and pushes it beyond its Kantian limits. My reading of the postcolonial
sublime draws upon Kristeva’s provocative formulation of abjection. For whilst she
champions novatio, what emerges is a sublime that functions less dialectically than in
we find in Derrida’s reading of Kant in The Truth in Painting. Derrida reads the
‘analytic of the sublime’ as appendix according to the logic of the supplement, rather
than the logic of the event (Lyotard), in order to refigure the incommensurability of the
faculties. If for Lyotard the faculties remain always already irreducible, for Derrida this
maintaining the purity of the faculties, the frame, the parergon. Thus Kant ‘fails’ to
produce a purely aesthetic space to undertake the task of reconciling freedom and
necessity. But rather than suggest that this task is always already untenable, Derrida
suggests that it is this untenability that enables its cultural workability. The sublime, for
instance, as opposed to the beautiful exemplifies this necessary impossibility. Set forth
exceeds cise and good measure”83 — the sublime emerges as that which is
uncontainable, and which negates order. But, as Derrida points out, this absence of
frames actually functions as a frame. This frame can be formulated through the
question: “Why is the large (absolutely) sublime and not the small (absolutely)?”.84
Since the “measure of the sublime has the measure of this unmeasure, of this violent
incommensurability”,85 as Derrida puts it, it can be said that the sublime as the limitless
thus requires a (quasi)limit. For my purposes, this thesis asks: why is the sublime a
noble and not a base trope? And asserts that the sublime as a noble trope is structured
by cultural desire. In the context of Derrida’s study of Kant, what this question
41
the question of art. The aesthetic emerges as less a discrete domain, in the case of the
sublime the purely limitless, than a site of contaminations, border crossings, impurities,
that are at once transgressions and necessities in the context of Kant’s architecture.
Thus in the margins of Derrida’s text, in the question of the difficulty of maintaining a
distinction between art and philosophy (the subject of The Truth in Painting), we can
hear the cultural resonances that invade Kant, the old cliché: ‘size does matter’, or more
authority. To use the language of Kant, Reason demands the possibility of its demise, it
exists in a dynamic, even antagonistic relation with the other faculties. This necessarily
dynamic, rather than fixed and stagnant. The encounter with the limit opens up the
possibility that it is not always possible for Reason to re-establish itself in the same
terms.
It is this vulnerability that opens up, what I would wish to call, the postcolonial
sublime. In this space of vulnerability it is possible to speak less of what Lyotard calls
the “abyss between heterogeneous phrases”,86 the ‘eventalisation’ of history, than the
movements. The postcolonial sublime arises in that moment in which the boundaries of
(Western) being are in the process of (re)formation, or to follow Freud, the disturbing
compulsion to repeat. Indeed in Bloom’s work on Freud, which attempts to find literary
moments that exceed the infantile repressions of the uncanny, in his turn to the excesses
of “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” he finds a ‘great shock’ that is akin to what could be
called the necessity of the West’s ‘flirt’ with the abyss of the abject. According to
Bloom, Freud “verges upon showing ... that to be human is a catastrophic condition”.
42
Freud’s passage into the sublime arises when he writes: “It seems, then, that a drive is
an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things”, and then, as
Bloom notes, “slays his beloved trope of ‘drive’ by disguising it in the armour of his
“the aim of all life is death”. For Bloom the wounding of “his figuration of ‘drive’”,
reveals Freud “in a truly Sublime or ‘uncanny’ fashion”.88 Thus as the great theorist of
civilisation and repression in his ‘literary’ moments reveals, ultimately the compulsion
to repeat, rather than repress and contain, opens up the disturbing force of the sublime,
of the ultimate sublime moment, the abyss of death (the nothing happens), as the most
that “is necessarily antithetical to nearly any theory of the imagination”,89 and which
offers only a partial psychology of the sublime, appears like the sublime to be a
narrative of leave and return, of loss and (re)gain. But unlike the sublime the uncanny
arises in an encounter with the unfamiliar, “that class of the terrifying”, Freud tells us,
that “leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar”.90 The sublime
object (after Kant) is excess, surplus, the uncontainable spillage, the ‘too much’ of
Freud, the pleasure principle. The sublime thus cannot be understood as a particular
excess that negates, collapses, disrupts. Reason’s movement in what I have called the
fort/da of the sublime, whilst upon the surface may attempt to reinstate the familiar,
must necessarily open up the disruptive capacity of unpleasure as a signal of its own
dynamic capacity. This means that the ‘return’, or the resolution of the struggle
between Reason and its dissolution in the face of the sublime, may not be the same.
The return to order that can be seen in Garvin, though energetic, has been forced to shift
43
its terms. The sublime is pure negation, vertigo, collapse, the disorder and confusion
that arises when the libidinal excesses surface and signal that meaning is no longer
constructing a dynamic culture. This means that ultimately Reason’s grounding in the
unified Kantian self is fluid, in process, productive rather than fixed and stagnant.
This space of excess and contamination that threatens and reveals authority is
the terrain of this thesis. It is my contention that nationalist myths of unity (Renan) are
always forged in and against some kind of crises. Whilst it is the case that the object of
this threat can be said to play into the hands of the colonial (as in the case of Kant), it
can also be said that this opening up of the space that threatens unity always entails the
possibility of its disruption. In attempting to define the limits of the nation — through
the trope of Us and Them — nationalist discourses bring into being an ‘outside’ that
represents the base, the detested, the hybrid, the grotesque, the uncanny. Here we find
the figure of the postcolonial, who occupies that dark side of the nation-state that cannot
be made to fit into nationalist social norms. Thus at the edges of Western being we find
a site that is at once necessary and repulsed. The myth of nation entails within its
formulation the possibility of its disturbance. In this regard I follow both Hegel and
I have suggested that Moraru’s parallel model, which evokes slippages and
excesses, points of uncertainty that expose and exploit reason’s vulnerability, leads us
directly to the discourse of the sublime. Thus, as in all theories of the sublime, I am
taking up the problem of its object. What is the object of the postcolonial sublime? I
would wish to resist the notion that the sublime is fundamentally a natural condition, a
particular conscious mode that applies to all conditions and all times. This is a major
problem concerning the Kantian sublime, which, assumes that the sublime is somehow a
natural effect. If we were to follow such thinking, the postcolonial sublime would
44
emerge as an effect, of a particular kind of object, that would distinguish the
postcolonial sublime from all the other sublimes. But in evoking the postcolonial
sublime as a critical term, I would wish at the outset to stress that there actually is no
unique sublime object of the postcolonial. There is no postcolonial sublime in the strict
sense. Since the discourse of the sublime is entrenched in European art and theory there
seems little point in extracting a comparable quid pro quo from the discourse of the
postcolonial.
Far more interesting, and this is what I would wish to take up, is the notion that
the discourse of the postcolonial goes to work upon the discourse of the sublime. As I
will show in chapter two, the sublime has been a crucial trope in the discourses of
colonial expansion. The sublime thus emerges as a problem for the discourse of the
the authority and the dynamism of reason, the Idealism of Kant and Hegel sets forth the
notion that reason, as a faculty of mind, is forged in and through its mastery over the
conscious excesses that characterise the sublime. The necessity of the sublime in the
process that established the authority of reason, signals that reason is at once the master
of its conscious domain, and yet vulnerable, since its mastery is established in the face
moment in the discourse of the postcolonial. The sublime emerges as a critical site
upon which the authority of reason is written. To disrupt this authority it is necessary,
therefore, to unleash the sublime, its unpresentable excesses, from the shackles of
Notes
45
1
Stephen Slemon, “The Scramble for Post-colonialism”, in The Post-Colonial Studies
Reader, ed., Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995),
45.
2
T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, in Selected Essays (New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960), 4.
3
Jasper Goss, “Postcolonialism: Subverting Whose Empire?”, Third World Quarterly,
vol. 17, no. 2 (1996), 240, 242.
4
Edward Said, “Foreword”, in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed., Ranajit Guha and
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), x.
5
Said, “Foreword”, x.
6
Christian Moraru, “Refiguring the Postcolonial: The Transnational Challenges”, Ariel:
A Review of International English Literature, vol. 28, no. 4 (1997), 172.
7
David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 6.
8
I am not suggesting that colonialism suddenly disappeared without a trace after the
war. My reference to the post-war period as constitutive of what might be called
postcoloniality, is based on the (perhaps Western) notion that the course of the world’s
economic and political domains were radically altered after the war. Such a course,
with its twists and turns, continues to the current day. What this suggests is that the
deviation in the direction of Europe’s empires after the war is a crucial factor in any
consideration of the current economic and political landscape. Thus rather than isolated
enclaves that suggest that all this talk of postcoloniality is fraudulent, the ‘postwar
empires’ such as the former Soviet Union, which continued colonising well into the
seventies, should only be understood in terms of their economic and military relation to
the postwar global formation. In a theoretical sense, in this regard I draw upon an
interesting observation made by Christian Moraru, in his provocative, “Refiguring the
Postcolonial: The Transnational Challenges”. Moraru points out that “the last empire to
fall apart was the former Soviet Union. … For two decades [60’s and 70’s] this regime
did its best to follow through the plans of Soviet imperialism. These plans entailed the
whole repertoire of ‘classical’ colonialism”. This obviously means that the postwar
period did not signal that colonialism had been dead and buried. Moraru in this light,
however, does not call for an abandonment of the postcolonial canon outright. Instead
he suggests what I take to be an acknowledgment of the necessity of postwar criticism.
“This study”, Moraru explains, “invites first and foremost a radical reassessment of the
postcolonial in the new, postcommunist and post-Marxist context. … I am envisioning
an updated postcolonial paradigm, able to build on the ‘classical’ postcolonial critique
as well as to evolve and address head-on the dynamic of transnational exchanges” (175,
176-177). See also Carol Breckenridge, Peter van der Veer, ed., Orientalism and the
Postcolonial Predicament (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 1-3.
9
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991
(London: Abacus, 1995), 216.
10
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University
Press, 1983), Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1985), Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge:
46
Cambridge University Press, 1990), Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
(London: Verso, 1991).
11
Ross Poole, “How European is Nationalism? A Response to Philip Gerrans”, Political
Theory Newsletter, 7 (1995), 60-66.
12
See also Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967).
13
Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (London: Zed Press,
1986), 140.
14
See also Basil Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the
Nation-State (London: James Currey, 1992). He argues that the nation-state brings an
alien set of institutions to Africa, that the legal-constitutional frameworks on which
decolonised states were/are based failed to draw traditional structures of authority into
modern state structures, leaving people ‘affectless’ in their relationship with
bureaucracy. And Nicholas Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1992). He writes: “Claims about nationality necessitated
notions of culture that marked groups off from one another in essential ways, uniting
language, race, geography, and history in a single concept. Colonialism encouraged and
facilitated new claims of this kind, re-creating Europe and its others through its histories
of conquest and rule” (3).
15
Jasbir Jain in Problems of Postcolonial Literatures and other Essays (Jaipur:
Printwell, 1991), defends the use of the term ‘postcolonial’, rather than ‘post-
independence’ as an adequate description of the current cultural condition in India, but
uses the term pejoratively, rather than as a marker of radical independence. For Jain the
colonial attitude remains in tact despite political freedom. This is manifest in India’s
continuing adherence to the West. Jain writes, “the colonial period not only created a
sense of alienation from the native cultural tradition, but also ingrained an attitude of
subjection” (3). Subsequently cultural domains, such as literary criticism, continue to
look to and embrace Western theory, rather than taking up the challenge to develop
modes of interpretation within the Indian framework. Attempts which do seek to
develop ‘Indian’ cultural theories usually look back to India’s mythical and utopian
golden age as a conceptual model, and fail to address current sociopolitical needs. Jain
concludes: “to free ourselves from the postcolonial structures, it is necessary perhaps to
overcome nostalgia, and to interpret our reality as it confronts us” (13).
16
Goss, “Postcolonialism: Subverting Whose Empire?”, 243.
17
See Chris Patten, “Of Tigers, Bulls, and Bears: Collusion and Cronyism Cannot be
the Basis for Sustained Economic Growth”, Time (2 February, 1998), 60-62. Patten’s
colonial disposition also characterises the West’s view of economic failures of the
former USSR.
18
It would also be possible to contend that this heterogeneity characterises the demands
of contemporary scholarship generally. In something like what Lyotard has called the
postmodern condition, it now seems inadequate to not draw upon a wide range of
disparate critical concerns. This is exemplified, for instance, in Ali Rattansi, who
asserts that a “properly ‘postcolonialist’ analysis … requires the acknowledgement of a
47
set of processes in which cultural formation is dispersed along a number of axes of
potentially commensurate importance ! class, certainly, but also sexuality and gender,
racism, familial relations, religious discourses, conceptions of childhood and child-
rearing practices, and requiring therefore also an understanding of underlying processes
of psychic development and ‘deformation’” (“Postcolonialism and its Discontents”,
Economy and Society, vol. 26, no. 4 (1997), 482).
19
Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?”, trans. Martin Thom, in Nation and Narration, ed.
Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 11.
20
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Rani of Sirmur”, in Europe and its Others, ed.
Francis Barker, (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1985), vol. 1, 128-151; “Can
the Subaltern Speak?”, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson,
Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinios Press, 1988), 271-313.
21
Aijaz Ahmad, “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality”, Race & Class, vol. 36, no. 3
(1995), 9.
22
Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global
Capitalism”, Critical Inquiry, 20 (1994), 350, 353. For similar critiques, see: Benita
Parry, “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse”, The Oxford Literary
Review, vol. 9, no. 1-2 (1987), 27-58; Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress:
Pitfalls of the term Post-Colonialism”, Social Text, vol. 31. no. 32 (1992), 84-98; Ella
Shohat, “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial’”, Social Text, vol. 31, no. 32 (1992), 99-113; and
Patrick Williams, “Problems of Post-colonialism”, Paragraph, vol. 16, no. 1 (1993), 91-
102.
23
See for instance, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Editor’s Introduction: Writing “Race” and
the Difference It Makes”, Critical Inquiry, 12 (1985), 1-20; Ania Loomba,
“Overworlding the Third World”, Oxford Literary Review, vol. 13, no. 1-2 (1991), 164-
192; Stan Anson, “The Postcolonial Fiction”, Arena, no. 96 (1991), 64-66.
24
Martina Michel in “Positioning the Subject: Locating Postcolonial Studies”(Ariel,
vol. 26, no. 1 (1995), 83-99) argues that the postcolonial makes a significant break with
the postmodern (the celebration of the fractured subject as an end in itself). Whilst
subjects are constructed through discourse, there is an agency set forth in the
negotiation, or awareness of the self’s positionality, in/of the various discourses
involved in that construction. This means that the postcolonial, unlike the postmodern,
privileges subjectivity and its construction/negotiation. See also Kwame Anthony
Appiah, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?”, (Critical Inquiry, 17
(1991), 336-357), which charts a connection on the basis that the post in both
theorisations can be read as a “space clearing gesture” that works towards challenging
“earlier legitimating narratives” (348, 353); Simon During, “Postmodernism or Post-
colonialism Today”, Textual Practice, vol. 1, no. 1 (1987), 32-47. During argues that
“the concept postmodernity has been constructed in terms which more or less
intentionally wipe out the possibility of post-colonial identity” (33); Arun Mukherjee,
“Whose Post-Colonialism and Whose Postmodernism?”, World Literature Written in
English, vol. 30, no. 2 (1990), 1-9; Vijay Mishra, and Bob Hodge, “What is Post(-
)colonialism?”, Textual Practice, vol. 5, no. 3 (1991), 399-414; and Linda Hutcheon,
“The Post Always Rings Twice: the Postmodern and the Postcolonial”, Textual
Practice, vol. 8, no. 3 (1994), 205-238.
48
25
Deepika Bhari, “Once More with Feeling: What is Postcolonialism?” (Ariel, vol. 26,
no. 1 (1995), 51-82) in grappling with the meaning of independence contends: “it may
be misleading and, worse, unhelpful to think of “postcolonial” issues as only those
marked by European imperialism; nor is it always useful to conceive of the
“postcolonial” as an adequate descriptor for the diverse experiences of the many
nations/cultures thus described. Nor, alas, as Spivak, among others, has observed, is the
present moment in these nations “post” the colonial in any genuine, or even cursory,
sense, as covert mercantile neo-colonialism, potent successor to modern colonialism,
continues its virtually unchallenged march across the face of the earth, ensuring that the
wretched will remain so, colluding in, as they did before, but now also embracing, the
process of economic and cultural annexation, this time well disguised under the name
modernization … The continuing and, in fact, increasing economic and cultural
dependence of these nations in the new world order make a mockery of the assumption
that, by a certain political rubric, independent status has been achieved … on the basis
of a signed document. So, too … do the growing tribalism and sectarianism in the
many trouble spots around the world mock the very idea of the nation” (58-59).
26
Gyan Prakash, “Introduction”, in After Colonialism, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton,
New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995), 5.
27
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1988), 45.
28
Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 95.
29
Poole, “How European is Nationalism? A Response to Philip Gerrans”, 61.
30
Mark Berger, “The End of the Third World”, Third World Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 2
(1994), 267-268.
31
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Subaltern Studies and Critique of History”, Arena, no. 96
(1991), 110.
32
Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India”, in
Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 37, 39.
33
Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism”, American Historical
Review (December 1994), 1475.
34
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography”, in
Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 10-11.
35
Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography”, 13.
36
Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1991), 7.
37
Said, Orientalism, 71-72.
49
38
Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 178-179.
39
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 145.
40
Blackwell’s recently published Fanon: A Critical Reader (1996) attests to the
richness of Fanon’s work.
41
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Constance Farrington (London:
Penguin, 1967), 219.
42
Homi Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition”, in
Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams, Laura
Chrisman (Hemel Hempstead, England: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 114.
43
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 25.
44
R. Radhakrishnan, Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 178.
45
Said, Orientalism, 21.
46
Rattansi, “Postcolonialism and its Discontents”, 482.
47
Moraru, “Refiguring the Postcolonial”, 178.
48
Benedict Anderson, “Exodus”, Critical Inquiry, 20 (1994), 321, 322, 326.
49
Anderson, “Exodus”, 327.
50
Zulfikar Ghose, “This landscape, These People”, The Loss of India (London:
Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1964), 21.
51
Anderson, Imagined Communities, 37-46.
52
Franco Morretti, “Dialectic of Fear”, trans. David Forgacs, Signs Taken for Wonders
(London: Verso, 1983), 83, 85, 86.
53
Morretti, “Dialectic of Fear”, 93, 94.
54
Morretti, “Dialectic of Fear”, 105.
55
Morretti, “Dialectic of Fear”, 108.
56
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 115.
57
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (Dover, Delaware: The Consortium, 1992), 140,
141.
58
Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 158.
50
59
Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 141.
60
Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 131.
61
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans.
Richard Howard (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973), 25.
62
Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 141-142.
63
Todorov, The Fantastic, 25.
64
Samuel Monk in his influential study, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in
XVIII-Century England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), suggests that
all theories of the sublime return to Kant (6).
65
James Garvin, “The Maintenance of Empire: A Study in the Economics of Power”, in
The Empire and the Century (London: John Murray, 1905), 140.
66
James Garvin, The Economic Foundations of Peace: or World-Partnership as the
Truer Basis of the League of Nations (London: Macmillan & Co., 1919), 77.
67
Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, trans. James Strachey, The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVIII
(London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), 9-10.
68
Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, 35, 36.
69
Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, 53.
70
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New
York: Colombia University Press, 1982), 1, 4, 2.
71
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.
72
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 5.
73
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.
74
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4, 8.
75
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 5.
76
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 11.
77
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 12.
78
Jean-François Lyotard, “Answer to the Question: What is the Postmodern?”, in The
Postmodern Explained to Children, ed. Julian Pefanis, Morgan Thomas (Sydney: Power
Publications, 1992), 23-24.
79
Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey
51
Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 104.
80
Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth
Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 53.
81
David Carroll, Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida (London: Routledge, 1987),
173-184.
82
In this regard I follow Meaghan Morris, “Postmodernity and Lyotard’s Sublime”, in
The Pirate’s Fiancee: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism (London: Verso, 1988), 223-
240. See also Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1993), 184-187.
83
Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington, Ian Mcleod
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 122.
84
Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 136.
85
Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 129.
86
Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den
Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 143.
87
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 209.
88
Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1982), 106-107.
89
Bloom, Agon, 96.
90
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”, Collected Papers, trans. Joan Riviere (London:
Hogarth Press, 1925), vol. 4, 369-370.
52
Chapter Two
... even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his
slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over
Gordon Bennett’s Painting for a New Republic (The Inland Sea)2 locates the
colonised self in an oblique relation with the colonial promise of Enlightenment order.
Looking out from a swirling, violent, and fractured experiential world that bears no
overall organising principle — including: the Union Jack, a colonial boat, skulls and
bones, a pyramid, a floating bloodied head, skeletons, Western desert patterns — we see
the promise of a golden ordered world, occupied by the text of the great master of
Idealism, Kant. The jarring disjunction, radical reversal, of the subjective self and the
object here disrupts the Rationalist preoccupation with a priori unity. The pure promise
of an Enlightened ordered world does not find its way to this subject, and remains as a
consequence an empty illusion, a matter of cultural production, colonial desire. But this
mirror (that owes less to Kant than to Lacan). In this space of reflection the
subjectivity of exile converge. In the words of Ian Mclean, Bennett’s work exposes “the
shadows of official ‘history’”, but refuses to situate the confrontation of these selves —
Kant and the exile — in a dialectic. Rather than “directly oppose one type of history
with another”, in the context of the painting a spatial opposition in which the colonised
self, rather than disrupt the coloniser, could be said to actually reproduce the coloniser’s
53
assumptions, Bennett “maps the oblique paths by which these different conceptions of
From this space of the ‘cross over’, a sort of in-between, Bennett intervenes in
Australia’s conservative racial and ethnic politics. Whilst it would be tempting to argue
Such a questioning opens up what Bhabha has called the split space of the pedagogic
and the performative in the discourse of the nation.4 In the performance of cultural
exile, that temporal space caught in-between and outside the remembrance of the past
and the forgetfulness of everyday life, the pedagogic in-this-place! is interrupted. The
remembering, rather than the (Idealist) European myths of triumph against great odds.
This other time in its convergence with the myth of nation arises disturbingly and
this self in the mirror calls to remembrance. Painting for a New Republic (The Inland
Sea) attempts to clear a space (of questioning) in which national myths are always
But there is also another important moment here. Bennett’s refusal to occupy
the dialectic of resistance interrupts the notion, of the postcolonial canon generally, that
Kantian philosophy (the golden order of Enlightenment), its fixity, is the given of
colonial desire. Staged in relation to its opposite, the violent chaos of the figure of
cultural exile, the colonial desire for firm epistemological, moral, and social foundations
emerges within the postcolonial as a myth of origin. Colonial logic begins at a fixed
point, the transcendent Ideal to use the language of the critical Kant, and then proceeds
54
to make this fixed Ideal an actuality. Yet the radical disjunction of the exile and the
promise of Kantian order reveals that the chaotic, whilst it appears as order’s opposite,
is actually a condition of that order. In other words, what emerges is the notion that
Kantian Reason establishes unity, rather than proceeds from a fixed point. Unity is
Reason’s goal, never its starting point. Unity is Reason’s teleology. This means that
the sublime lack of order of the displaced consciousness, and its political possibilities,
need to be re-thought. Rather than a threat, it could be that the displaced, and the hybrid
actually serve the purposes of Kantian Reason. As I argued in chapter one, the figure of
the monstrous migrant (explored by Rushdie) takes two forms. The first emerges as the
essentialised other that the equally essentialised metropolitan centre utilises to define
itself. The monstrous Saladin Chamcha is such a figure. His goat-like form merely
symbolised what the metropolitan centre was not. I contended that Rattansi’s
intertwined model exemplifies the Hegelian terms that constitutes such a relation
between the metropolitan centre and the postcolonial migrant. Conversely, I contended
that the figure of Gibreel Farishta represents a second, much more disturbing image of
the postcolonial migrant. His disturbing figure exploits the anxiousness, the underside
of the confidence of the metropolitan centre. The figure of the postcolonial migrant
thus emerges as an invader of sorts. This thesis seeks to theorise this image of the
migrant as (monstrous) invader through the trope of the sublime. My contention is that
where there is Western confidence there is also an anxiousness that can be understood in
terms of the discourse of the sublime. In its insistence upon disturbing Kantian order,
Painting for a New Republic (The Inland Sea) thus also demands that we (re)turn to the
work of Kant,5 in order to deal with what I would wish to call the anxious dynamism of
My aim in this chapter will be to re-read the Kantian sublime in the light of
Bennett’s incisive painting. I would wish to show that the Kantian sublime (which is
55
utilised to establish reason’s authority) is essentially a conservative trope. For the
discourse of the postcolonial, the sublime thus emerges as a critical site upon which the
therefore, to consider the sublime, its unpresentable excesses, and its location in relation
to reason’s processes. My tactic will be to inhabit the edges of Kant’s thought, in order
to draw out the social and political implications of the architecture of the Kantian self.
this undertaking. How is it possible to think this space of intervention, its time, its
politics? In order to inhabit the edges of Kant’s thought, I would wish to take up his
appears in Critique of Pure Reason, I take the term in its second usage, as it emerges in
Critique of Judgement: as ‘the critique of taste’, or ‘the philosophy of art’. The former
accounts for ‘determinate judgement’, the latter introduces another form of judgement,
from the particular to the universal — have opened up a rich palimpsest of ideas and
contestations. As Schopenhauer notes, “we are bound to wonder how Kant, to whom
certainly art remained very foreign, and who in all probability had little susceptibility to
the beautiful, in fact probably never had the opportunity to see an important work of art,
and who seems finally to have no knowledge even of Goethe ... was able to render a
great and permanent service to the philosophical consideration of art”.7 Though clearly
framed by the principles of pain and pleasure, authentic life, common sense, tradition,
and harmony, as well as its remarkable ambition, reflective judgement seems to remain
indeterminate.
Whilst recent readers foreground what is considered Kant’s failure to unite the
theoretical and the practical, liberate the aesthetic from what is considered the tyranny
56
of logical philosophy, and underscore the indeterminate basis for questions of art,
politics, and justice (Lyotard, Arendt), my reading will inhabit the edges of the more
Romantic Kant (which can be detected in all of the three Critiques). Kant’s remarkable
claim in the third Critique is that the working union of knowledge and morality is not
possible without art. Bennett’s rejection of the possibilities of the Kantian promise of
order is thus all the more compelling. In discourses dealing with the constructedness of
the figure of the nation, which is my (postcolonial) concern, Kant’s aesthetic occupies a
Gellner’s and Hobsbawm’s emphasis on the nation as invention,8 the romantic character
the course of the thesis will be to explore how the discourse of the postcolonial disrupts
nationalism’s desire “to represent itself in the image of Enlightenment”.9 I would wish
to re-read, what for Chatterjee is the failure of this desire — epistemological unity and
moral order — in terms of the dynamic that Bennett opens up, his insertion of the
question of exile into the Kantian equation. Whilst Chatterjee stages the Enlightenment
always already thwart a pretension to order, I would wish to read Kant’s remarkable
ambition to unite the theoretical and the practical in terms of a particular dynamic that
renders the slippages and contradictions of his discourse as both indispensable and
necessary for Reason’s smooth operation. In other words, the notion that Enlightenment
postcolonial theory, does not take the necessary excesses, movements, and changes that
57
lay at the core of the West’s sense of progress into account. It seems to me that
Enlightenment culture is built upon a dynamic of excess and slippage that renders its
rather than being an enemy to the cause of its Enlightenment thought outright, are
actually structural necessities. This means that if we are to take up the disruptive
capacity of the postcolonial, we need to turn to consider the discourse of the sublime
and its part in the literary construction of a colonial consciousness. The assumption of
linked to that moment, as Weiskel puts it, “implicit in the act of ‘joining’ with the
great”,10 and acting in the world of objects as if this is the case. This is not to say that
gathering of the great around a single unifying term. It is to acknowledge that in the
thought as the ultimate authority, is able to assume such a status precisely because the
metaphor of the sublime, the transcendental dynamic that it opens up, is utilised at that
moment in which its legitimation is dramatically called for. This means that rather than
fail, Reason emerges as a dynamic, structural principle that is less content orientated
than hegemonic.
Without colonial expansion, and the venturesome risks that it affords, Kantian
Reason is a hollow emptiness. Without some kind of idea of what constitutes the grand,
the great, the powerful, the heroic etc., and some measure of its exploits, the discourse
58
of Reason is a blind tautology. It seems to me that the Kantian self, ruled by Reason,
draws into its formulation the character of the coloniser, who, in the form of the heroic
discoverer and civiliser goes forth in order to impose its limits upon the ‘objective’
world. It is in this sense that we can locate the work of the sublime. Kant in his
endeavour to proclaim the supremacy of Reason, and the possibilities for such a self
(Sapere aude!),11 also sought to anchor the authority of Reason in an idea, more
accurately a feeling of greatness via the sublime. My aim will be to unpack the nature
of this greatness, so that it can be juxtaposed to the interventions of Bennett and the
discourse of the postcolonial. I would wish to contend that the Kantian sublime
emerges in the context of European expansionism. I will begin exploring the Kantian
sublime by outlining the philosophical basis of the Kantian self. I will then socially
locate this self, in order to underscore the social implications of the Kantian sublime.
Foremost in my inquiry is the issue of what I have called Western anxiousness, the
sublime, I would wish to show that this anxiousness is a necessity for reason, and also
exploited.
We can begin to chart this vulnerability by examining Kant’s theory of the self.
The Kantian self begins in the radical reformulation of the relationship of the object of
inform processes or whether processes inform ideas, the exigency of this radical
The traditional theories of the self, as Joyce Appleby explains, that “begin with the
59
clearly lacked the desires that lay at the core of expansionism. Theories of the self thus
shift to focus upon the basis for an expansionist desire. As such, Appleby continues, in
the context of capitalist expansion, theories of the self stress an individual need that
coincides, strangely, with a “common set of needs”.12 For Charles Taylor, the erosion
whereby theories of the unified natural self, the “ontic logos” as he calls it, have
varying ways”. The “disengagement from cosmic order” meant that “the human agent
In keeping with the revised theories of the self that Appleby and Taylor outline,
two philosophical dangers. Upon the first, the disturbing spectre of empiricism had
attacked the basis of rational reflection. Condillac asserted in his Traité des Sensations,
for instance, that reflective possibility is simply a habit that has been formed in time.
knowledgeable, merely replays what has been derived from sensory experience, the
throughout the work to show how the senses produced ideas, Condillac contended that
“I have formed the habit of certain judgments which refer my sensations where they are
not. ... Thus the statue is nothing other than what it has acquired. Why would the same
not be true of man?”.14 Upon the second front, the Leibnizian metaphysical tradition, of
which Kant was a part, had unleashed a philosophical excess that effectively
which debates concerning Aufklärung had gathered, Leibniz argued that every
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consciousness (‘monad’) in essence requires no need of a world of objects to function.
His famous phrase, “the monad is windowless”,15 meant that perceptions can never be
brought about by action from outside.16 They must, in some sense, be generated
spontaneously within the monad itself. This means that the relationships between “all
created things”, rather than conflictual and effective, are determined by their inner,
particular one”, Leibniz writes, “and of each one to all the rest, brings it about that every
simple substance has relations which express all the others and that it is consequently a
perpetual living mirror of the universe”. The problematic relationship between the mind
and the body, perhaps the central philosophical issue of the day, was thus claimed to
have been resolved. According to the logic of monadology, the resolution is that there
is no relationship, there is merely a coincidence. Leibniz asserts, “the soul follows its
own laws, and the body likewise follows its own laws. They are fitted to each other in
virtue of the preestablished harmony between all substances, since they are all
debate. His reformulation of the self should be read in the context of the European
expansionism of which these philosophical and social debates are a crucial part. Kant’s
work establishes the power and authority of Reason, that faculty of mind that,
ultimately, marks the individual. It is in and against the notion that the universe is a
machine in which human thought and action can be reduced to “how system into system
runs”,18 as Pope put it, that Kant writes. In such notions the empirical self is a kind of
victim, helpless and absurd. Questions concerning the moral worth of the individual, if
we are to follow thinkers such as Condillac, and to certain extent Hume, are essentially
meaningless.19 Kant also sought to rescue metaphysics from its dogmatic excesses, its
61
beyond the world of the senses”, Kant explains, “where experience can yield neither
guidance nor correction ... our reason carries on those enquiries [God, Freedom, and
Immortality] which owing to their importance we consider to be far more excellent, and
in their purpose far more lofty, than all the understanding can learn in the field of
appearances”. But the metaphysics that “confidently sets itself to this task” does so,
Kant argues, “without any previous examination of the capacity or incapacity of reason
significant that Kant set about, as he puts it in the “Preface to the Second Edition” of the
first Critique, “discovering the path upon which it [reason] can securely travel”.21 This
and it is only through the understanding that it has its own [specific] empirical
employment. … Reason has … as its sole object, the understanding and its
effective application. Just as the understanding unifies the manifold in the object
ideas, positing a certain collective unity as the goal of the activities of the
understanding.22
This means that the goal of the understanding by means of the concepts (a unified
empiricist emphasis upon the self as a clean slate upon which nature writes its
immutable laws.23 Moreover, the ‘risky’ Leibnizian practice of separating the Ideas
from the conditions that make experience possible, in order to make dogmatic, yet
62
Rather than replay Kant’s theory of knowledge, I would wish to focus upon
reason is particularly nuanced. In order to argue that the discourse of the postcolonial
seizes the Kantian sublime and pushes it beyond its limits, it will be useful to chart such
nuances. The metaphor directly relates to European expansionism, and the European
mean? Kant argues that the coincidence of reason’s ideas and the thing-it-itself (since
they are both part of the same universe, as Leibniz claimed) is simply a (dangerous)
mistake. The self’s limited (sensory) view of the world means that it is impossible to
know the thing-in-itself absolutely.24 We can never see the world as (a) God. But there
is more at stake here than what is clearly Kant’s pious anxiousness concerning the
capacity of the self to rise above his or her meek station in life. The possibility of a
solid foundation for knowledge is also a crucial issue. If Reason’s unfounded claims
can be distinguished from its more secure employment, then it is possible to establish
confidently know that what is known is dependable. Such a solid domain, Kant
describes as “an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits. It is the land
of truth ... surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean”.25 ‘Security’ is thus inseparably
As the metaphor implies, this demand for a secure knowledge means that the
possibility of uncertainty is an ever present danger for theoretical Reason. Kant’s work
is built upon an anxiousness that arises in relation to the question of the authority of
reason. His important distinction between phenomena and noumena thus attempts to
ward off uncertainty, and to establish an authoritative basis for knowledge. Phenomena
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experience reveals it — are the basis for an empirically based, that is to say, a certain
knowledge. Kant argues that the “principles of pure understanding ... contain nothing
but what may be called the pure schema of possible experience”. All “concepts, and
with them all principles, even as such as are possible a priori, relate to empirical
intuitions, that is, to the data for a possible experience. Apart from this relation they
‘inferences’ that are based upon what the understanding supplies, and this alone.27 The
unity of experience is established via the ideas, which work upon the understanding,
empirically employed.28
Noumena, on the other hand, can be defined as the objects of thought that have
no direct link to the experiential world of the understanding. This is the domain of
science, yet still as natural disposition ... For human reason, without being moved
merely by idle desire for extent and variety of knowledge, proceeds impetuously,
In the constitution of this self, there thus exists an unrestrained desire for what will
become the elevation of conscious thought over the immediate world of the senses. But
in the domain of knowledge, for Kant such impetuosity, with its excesses and sense of
unbridled freedom, almost lawlessness, will never do. Against this ingrained character
unavoidable illusion ... which, though deceitful, cannot be restrained within the bounds
of experience by any resolution”, the pedagogic Kant sets forth what he describes as a
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solution. Such a solution is made possible “only by scientific instruction and with much
difficulty”.30 Reason’s security thus emerges as a great achievement carried out against
who made unfounded conclusions concerning the big questions — noumena: God,
but, like the monads of Leibniz, arise outside and beyond sensibility, all verifiable
phenomena. But in the context of this discussion on reason’s ‘security’, which seems to
be crucial for the Kantian self, the unbridled capacity of noumena signals that reason is
ultimately undetermined, that is to say, free. “For we cannot”, Kant asserts, say “of
sensibility that it is the sole possible kind of intuition”. Noumena are, therefore, not
dismissed outright by Kant’s deliberations upon knowledge. Instead they serve a useful,
In the light of the ‘dangers’ that surround it here, Reason emerges as a voyager
the source of this impending danger. For whilst perilous voyages imply that reason
leaves its homeland and ventures away, the dangers that it encounters do not come from
a space beyond its borders, but from its own ‘natural’ inclinations. What this suggests
capacity that far exceeds that employment. Reason thus in many respects sacrifices its
whilst always already a danger to reason’s surety concerning its sensible objects, “is not
only admissible”, Kant asserts, “but as setting limits to sensibility is ... indispensable”.32
The nature of this sacrificial gesture, the excesses that enable it, and the sense of
authority that accompanies it, are crucial. In view of the capacities that it sacrifices,
65
reason’s legitimate theoretical employment can be considered all the more authoritative.
The issue of reason’s ‘security’, which has been my concern thus far, directly relates to
certainty, and by extension, the capacity of the self to make authoritative claims
concerning the state of the world. Security equates to sure authority — the I knows that
the known is true. Backed by reason, the Kantian self in the context of colonial
For this thesis two crucial issues concerning the security of reason emerge.
Firstly, the objective authority of reason is inseparably linked to the irrational. In short,
the irrational enables Kant to establish reason’s theoretical limits. Secondly, since
excesses, excess emerges as a problem for the discourse of the postcolonial. If excess is
a necessity, how is it possible to disrupt reason? I would contend that the necessity of
the sublime in the process that established the authority of reason, signals that reason is
at once the master of its conscious domain, and yet vulnerable, since its mastery is
established in the face of the possibility of its collapse. The possibility of reason’s
collapse is a crucial moment in the discourse of the postcolonial. It opens up a space for
the sublime, its unpresentable excesses, from the shackles of the Kantian dialectic.
If in Critique of Pure Reason Kant is anxious to ward off the dangerous excesses
marked. The ideas which had been kept under check by a sacrificial logic in reason’s
theoretical employment become much more tenuous. I draw attention to the ideas in
order to underscore both reason’s authority and its vulnerability. As I will show in
subsequent chapters, my contention is that the disruptive capacity of the discourse of the
have demolished a purely empirical basis for knowledge, and to have dispelled the
66
grand illusions of rationalism, Kant further radicalises his theory of the self in his
engagement with the issue of morality. In the Critique of Practical Reason we find pure
reason in its practical form refusing to subordinate moral action to sensuality, and to
sensual knowledge. The freedom that was a major problem for theoretical reason, as
Kant’s concept of noumena revealed, now becomes central. If reason found it necessary
to willingly resist the lure of freedom in its theoretical employment, in its practical
employment “the possibility ! indeed, the necessity ! of thinking them” opens up the
possibility of thinking of the moral law and its relation to freedom. For practical reason,
Kant contends, the moral law “does provide a fact absolutely inexplicable from any data
of the world of sense or from the whole compass of the theoretical use of reason, and
this fact points to a pure intelligible world ! indeed, it defines it positively and enables
In what appears as almost a reverse of the function of the ideas of reason in its
theoretical employment, the ideas function without limits in its practical employment.
This is crucial, it reveals the disturbing indeterminacy of the ‘grounds’ upon which
principles,34 the ideas act like objects yet at the same time bear no relation to such.
Kant writes, there is “a great difference between something being given to my reason as
an object absolutely, or merely as an object in the idea. In the former case our concepts
are employed to determine the object; in the latter case there is in fact only a schema for
which no object … is directly given”.35 As the rules of the Reason’s legislative powers,
the ideas can be considered to be authoritative, that is to say legitimate, simply because
they are able to perform the task at hand: to bring unity to the manifold. What this
means is that there is no sense in which ideas can be considered legitimate because of
the content that they convey. Their legitimacy is understood in performative terms,
since they provide the structure that organises the manifold into a totality. The Ideas, in
67
reason’s legitimate theoretical employment, merely work with what the understanding
makes available. As such there is still a sense in which the sensory faculty limits
But since Ideas do not correspond to an object, there is always the possibility
that they can exceed the bounds of the understanding in order to operate purely in their
own (transcendent) terms. Perhaps this would be madness. Perhaps Leibniz was mad.
Yet the possibility of this excess is a crucial component in Kant’s masterful self, as I
will show. Significantly this sense of mastery is set forth via a theory of morality,
rather than knowledge. Mastery has to do with the acts of the self, which, as Kant
explains, “depends upon freedom”. In defending the moral basis of Plato’s Republic,
Kant declares, “it is the power of freedom to pass beyond any and every specified limit.
… where human reason exhibits genuine causality, and where ideas are operative causes
(of actions and their objects), namely, in the moral sphere … Plato rightly discerns clear
proofs of an origin from ideas”.36 And again, there “is in man a power of self-
But there is also a logic of sacrifice at work here. Though in this case reason
sacrifices the senses. It is in the humbling of sensual motives that the possibility of
moral action arises. In pietist fashion, the concept of the ‘highest good’, the ideal of
moral action, emerges solely from the idea of moral perfection in itself, which Reason
formulates a priori, and which is inseparably linked to the concept of freedom, rather
than the wayward passions of the body. In this instance the ideas have been
transformed and put to a different use, namely the relation of Reason to the will, as
opposed to the relation of Reason to the object, as in the case of Reason’s theoretical
employment. Again the problematic draws upon the supremacy of Reason, which in
68
If in Reason’s theoretical employment we find certain limits, as tentative as this
claim may be, it is only through moral action that Freedom can be set forth. Kant in this
regard is an indeterminist. The self is free to act in agreement with its choices, since
actions are not determined by sensory data in any shape or form. Whilst I am not
concerned here with long standing debates concerning freedom and causality, it will
suffice to say that what is crucial for Kant as an indeterminist is the notion that the self
the same motives always produce the same actions; the same events follow from
public spirit ! these passions, mixed in various degrees and distributed through
society, have been, from the beginning of the world, and still are, the source of all
of the actions and enterprises which have ever been observed among mankind.38
But action for Kant is considered to be always already moral, since it presupposes a
Kant tells us, “pure reason alone is practical of itself, and it gives (to man) a
universal law, which we call the moral law. ... The fact just mentioned is undeniable”.
The remarkable thing about the moral law is that it doesn’t exist in isolation as an
abstract entity hovering above the deeds of the self. Rather, Kant continues, “the law
has the form of an imperative”,39 which is derived from the subject alone. Duty to the
moral law thus arises in the relation of action to the autonomy of the will. The practical
law and freedom “reciprocally imply each other. … it is the moral law which leads
directly to the concept of freedom”.40 The self acts, but in order to act morally such
action must be free, since the concept of freedom implies the moral law. If the self acts
immorally, say out of sensual pride, or anger, or lust (in Kant’s day irredeemably
69
immoral), such actions imply a determination other than freedom; in the examples cited:
sensual appetites perhaps. Actions which are compatible to the autonomy of the will are
thus deemed moral, actions which are not, since a determining force other than freedom
is in play, cannot be free. The will whose maxims are necessarily in harmony with the
condition of freedom is a ‘holy will’, or an absolutely good will.41 In the dutiful action
the self enters a relation not to external necessities, but to the freedom of the will, as
I have suggested that reason’s authority in both the theoretical and practical
sphere emerges in performative, rather than metaphysical terms. For Kant there is no
rigid basis for the self, other than the capacity of the self to produce knowledge and to
act morally. I have also suggested that the confidence of Kant and his knowing and
reason from the dangerous sea of excess, to provide it with a stable homeland, an island
from which to establish its authority. We have encountered Kant the philosopher
revealing the transcendental principles that provide the conditions of the possibility of
the self’s knowledge of the object, and the self’s moral dynamism. It is interesting that
the basis for these transcendental principles, however, is not built upon the detailed
qualifies and brackets his “critical idealism”.42 Neither is it the philosopher preoccupied
with actualities, the truth. Instead, listen to Kant as the animating principle of the reign
of the reasonable self over the object begins to emerge. Remarkably we find Kant
simply appealing to what we might consider to be a simple ‘utility’: this is the ‘easier’
70
could reduce to a principle, we should at once acquiesce. But still we more gladly
listen to one who offers hope that the more we know nature internally and can
compare it with external members now unknown to us, the more simple shall we
find it in its principles, and that the further our experience reaches, the more
uniform shall we find it amid the apparent heterogeneity of its empirical laws.
It is crucial to note that Kant is not concerned with refuting, in this instance, the
notion that ultimately the understanding always already fails to grasp the object of
sense. In fact he is content to agree with this proposition. But at the same time this
resignation and perhaps nihilistic pessimism that attends to it, however, is overturned in
favour of a possibility that offers hope. Kant seems unshaken in his confidence
concerning this hope, which has as its object a unified experience. But this confidence,
which animates what could be considered Kant’s flirt with the possibility of
important for Kant is the possibility of an authoritative, masterful self. The third
Critique appeals to the necessity of a conscious unity, despite, what could be, the
is that knowledge and morality are both effected in the self in that crucial moment in
which Reason comes into play in order to legislate the experiential manifold and to
determine social action. Each employment derives its authority in and through a
71
relation with another aspect of self-hood, the transcendent ideas and the sensuous
desires that arise as a threat to reason’s authoritative employment. Kant claimed to have
found a new ground for asserting an autonomous self, a ‘transcendental ego’ equipped
to impose its desires upon the random acts of experience. I have shown that the
what was considered to be the moral vertigo of empiricism, and the excesses of
rationalism. Importantly these impending crises were located as parts of the Kantian
self, rather than objects that threaten from the ‘outside’. Reason is constituted in its
various forms through an antagonistic struggle with its own dark desires, its lofty
idealism, its bodily passions. The crowning jewel in the Kantian self thus arrives when
dissolution. Conversely, this self’s practical dynamism remains impotent without the
possibility of the condition of freedom being brought to bear upon the objects of
knowledge.
In light of the excesses upon which reason is established, and the simple utility
that animates the ‘hope’ that the Kantian self offers, I will turn to the question of the
sublime. In the following my aim will be to demonstrate the conservative basis of the
Kantian sublime, and that such a conservatism is inseparably linked to the European
desire for centrality upon the global stage. The sublime as excess arises in order to
define reason’s limits. The sublime is the object that reason overcomes in order to
establish its authority. It is my contention that it this conservatism that the discourse of
the postcolonial works against. In wresting the sublime from its conservative trajectory,
the discourse of the postcolonial interrupts the basis for reason’s authority.
Critique of Judgement works. At this point we encounter the famous abyss between
freedom and necessity. Whilst many have contended with this abyss as a philosophical
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problem, I would instead wish to consider it a political one. If the Kantian self is to
truly soar above empirical experience authoritatively, which as I have suggested is at the
freedom and its association with mastery becomes the condition of not only morality but
also of the self’s entire being in the world. It is in this sense of moving beyond
limitations, in the name of mastery, that the Critique of Judgement attempts to unite the
moral self and the knowing self through the judgement (aesthetic and teleological). The
‘habitation’ of Kant’s edge is much more pragmatic. I write in the shadow of over two
centuries of Kantian thought. My concern is with the ‘Kant effect’, rather than ‘Kant in
itself’.
Critique of Judgement sets as its task the problem of carving a space between
theoretical and practical Reason, the terrain of the first and second Critiques. Kant tells
us, “an immeasurable gulf is fixed between the sensible realm of the concept of nature
and the supersensible realm of the concept of freedom, so that no transition is possible
from the first to the second”. But this transition is necessary, Kant continues, since the
“concept of freedom is meant to actualize in the world of sense the purpose proposed by
its laws”44. In other words, the problem of the possibility of practical reason, or more
precisely the moral law, to preside over empirical experience, the domain of pure
reason, is central in Kant’s critical pursuit here. The necessity of this transition is thus
the concept of freedom, over the entire architectonic system. We thus find in Kant’s
Reason at the top of the pyramid as a kind of master over the domains of knowledge and
moral being.
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In order to achieve this crowning moment, Kant utilises reflective judgement,
the third faculty, that is situated between Pure Reason and Practical Reason, and which
functions according to a principle in which only the particular is a given, and the
“universal has to be found”. Reflective judgement begins with the particular, the
immediate, and then “ascends”, as Kant puts it, in order to establish a universal frame.
Kant tells us, that this process of ascension (I take note of this terminology) operates in
“particular concept, a priori, which has its origin solely in the reflective judgement”. 45
As such the reflective judgement has no determined object. Kant explains this as such,
the aesthetical judgment contributes nothing toward the knowledge of its objects,
and thus must be reckoned as belonging to the critique of the judging subject and
its cognitive faculties only so far as they are susceptible of a priori principles, of
whatever other use (theoretical or practical) they may be. This is the propaedeutic
of all philosophy.46
We can thus think of reflective judgement as that moment in which the mind turns
inward and becomes conscious of its own working. This self-consciousness is the
ground upon which Idealism writes itself. Without such there is no world, no self, no
Reflective judgement is divided into two basic operations: the aesthetic and the
teleological. I am mainly concerned with the aesthetic, which functions in two distinct,
yet interrelated ways, in terms of the beautiful and the sublime. If we recall the basic
task of the Critique of Judgement ! to unite theoretical and practical reason ! we find
Pure Reason via the work of the beautiful and the teleological in relation to the (pliable)
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Ideas. The feeling of pleasure that is attended to by beautiful forms in art and nature
implies an Idea of the similarity of nature and reflective thought. Kant calls this a
similarity that is implied in the feeling of pleasure also directly relates to the Idea of an
objective finality of nature for freedom, which is the object of teleological judgement.
The theoretical and the practical are thus united via the relation of the Idea to nature.
Kant tells us that the “beautiful arts and the sciences which, by their universally
communicable pleasure, and by the polish and refinement of society, make man more
civilised, if not morally better.” Since the Idea of nature as subject to the understanding
and the Idea of nature as art demands the supremacy of the supersensible concept of
freedom, the beautiful and the teleological “win us in large measure from the tyranny of
sense propensions, and thus prepare men for a lordship in which reason alone shall have
authority”.48
It is significant that the unity of the self is set forth solely in terms of the relation
between the Ideas and the beautiful and the teleological. It is here that the logical
necessity of Reason’s authority is established. But Kant does not seem to be ultimately
satisfied with this authority, since, it could be contended, the beautiful and the
teleological establish merely a subjective authority for Reason that ‘prepares men for
lordship’. This means that the Kantian self, whilst built upon the principle of strength in
unity, remains untried in the world of human affairs. Kant does not seem to be content
with the authority of this moment in purely performative terms. Thus, whilst there
conscious unity ! which leads Lyotard in his Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime to
conclude that the sublime thus emerges as a dangerous threat to Reason’s supremacy49
! I would argue that it is in the sublime moment that Kant’s unified self soars with
authority as an actor in the social world. What I would wish to suggest is that from
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Kant’s social perspective, to borrow a phrase from Schiller, without “the sublime,
beauty would make us forget our dignity”.50 It is precisely the possibility of threat that
enables Reason to establish its authority, its dignity. Such a proposition is in keeping
with myths of unity generally, which are always already established in and against some
kind of crises. It is in encountering the sublime, with its disturbing excesses, that the
Kantian self is able to be rescued from the clutches of oblivion — unified yet not an
actor — and in which Reason is ultimately able reign supreme in the social domain. For
embedded in the Ideas is the always already sense in which Reason itself is unlimited,
perhaps infinite,51 as the transcendent ideas suggest. Having established the possibility
of the impact of supersensible freedom upon knowledge and art via the Ideas, Kant
deals with what makes us susceptible to the ideas and their excessive possibilities in the
first place.52
simply derive an authority in purely performative terms. Whilst the Ideas function in a
limited fashion, the notion arises, since no object can be found, that Ideas are actually
unlimited, and that any sense of limitation is self imposed. Thus to glimpse an Idea in
its unlimited state is to glimpse what is absolutely great. It means that greatness
inhabits the self, who, because of the necessities of life, chooses to live a limited, yet
higher, existence. This notion relates directly to the discourse of the sublime, as I will
show.
Kant’s aesthetic is structured by the division between the beautiful and the
Reason itself the judgement’s concern becomes sublime, since it is preoccupied, in this
instance, with Reason’s ultimate task, namely to bring unity and freedom to bear upon
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the experiential manifold. As such the Kantian self is split. Whilst Kant reveals the
on the one hand, to impose its knowledge upon nature, and on the other, to overcome
the subjective resistances to this task. In other words if unity is the supreme principle of
reason, the self in order to find unity in nature, must at the same time produce a unified
subjectivity. Thus we find the necessity of an aesthetic moment which champions the
Susceptibility to pleasure from reflection upon the forms of things (of nature as
well as of art) indicates not only a purposiveness of the objects in relation to the
reflective judgment, conformably to the concept of nature in the subject, but also
their form or even their formlessness, in virtue of the concept of freedom. Hence
the aesthetical judgment is not only related as a judgment of taste to the beautiful,
with nature. Nature is not necessarily unified in terms of the immutable laws of the
divine, it is produced by the self in the subjective world of appearances. Already built
into Kant’s architectonic system, is the notion that nature, matter, is hostile to the self.
In this revival of Platonic thought, a unified consciousness of the world does not flow
‘naturally’ from sensual experience, it is set forth as a mandate that flows from the
feeling of pleasure to the understanding, as it manages, under the auspices of the ideas
of Reason to unite the manifold in terms of a single unifying principle. But unity as a
logical necessity implies that the condition of chaos is also necessary. Sensory
experience bursts into consciousness formlessly, and as such there is a sense in which
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the imagination and the understanding are always in conflict, since the imposition of
unity, the sorting out of the manifold by means of the categories and ultimately the ideas
of reason, seems to be selective. This means that there is always a sense in which
apparent, seemingly, in the mathematical and the dynamical sublime. It is thus possible
that both the feeling of pleasure occasioned in the act of bringing unity to bear upon the
manifold (the beautiful), and also the feeling of pain and pleasure, as Reason itself
becomes conscious of this subjective task (the sublime), are in play simultaneously.
Both the sublime and the beautiful are thus crucial moments for the Kantian self.
Each moment presupposes the other. Thus rather than a radical opposition, for
precondition for the necessity of the beautiful thus directly relates to Reason and its
legislative capacity. Just as Reynolds, who, in his pyramidical system of the self,
situates sublimity at the “pinnacle, or ultimate point”, of the self, “forming in the
imagination the figure of a pyramid”,55 Kant finds in the sublime moment Reason’s
ultimate extension as it exercises finally its supremacy over nature. This moment of the
self’s reckoning arises only in situations which threaten the existence, perhaps
possibility, of the unity of sensory experience. The Kantian self is thus built upon the
discussions concerning the sublime. This will enable us to contextualise Kant’s work,
which is a product of its time, and furnish its utilisation of sublimity with some
particularly interested in the confidence that the sublime threat engenders. I will focus
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upon the British tradition, since Kant seems to be well acquainted with its ideas. What
emerges is the implication of the sublime in what could be called the emergence of
British national pride. In taking up the sublime, Kant does not seem to depart from the
nobility and sense of dignity that the sublime brings to British national selves. I draw
upon this connection between the sublime and the emergence of British nationalism,
because I would wish to underscore the conservative nature of the trope of the sublime.
In the context of an expanding Europe, the sublime opens up a sense of nobility. Excess
for eighteenth-century Europe presented nothing less than lofty possibilities. Following
being raised above the slime, the mud, or the mould, of this world”.56 Such a
circumstance, John Baillie would go on to explain, “raises the mind to fits of greatness,
and disposes it to soar above her mother earth; hence arises that exultation and pride
which the mind ever feels from the consciousness of its own vastness”.57 The sublime
is derived from that sense of the self who seeks to escape and transcend the limits of the
some instances, the sublime is always already haunted by that stoic self that Plato
announced in Phaedo, who “manifests his efforts to release his soul from association
with his body to a degree that surpasses that of the rest of mankind”.58 We also find
fear and rational knowledge, and the savage and civilisation.59 The discourses of
elevation that draw upon the sublime are driven by a lack, a discontent, a feeling of
limitation, and strive to find meaning above and beyond immediate experience. The
sublime opens up the possibility of resisting the nihilistic resignation of the mundane. It
is to demand more of the immediate, and the sensory, to live with the constant need to
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supplement presence with an absence that transforms the meaning of things in
Thus the idea of the sublime is drawn up around the question of the
directly relates to the capacity of the self to confidently exploit the unpresentable. As
the sense of ‘elevation’ that the unpresentable authorised. The capacity to give form to
the unpresentable, served as a crucial measure of both the moral and intellectual worth
Dissertation on the Classics exemplifies what was at stake in discourses on the sublime.
He writes:
Ornaments and Illustrations must be borrowed from the richest Parts of universal
His Wisdom, Goodness and Power, of His Mercy and Justice, of His
the Sons of Men, we must raise our Thoughts, and enlarge our Minds, and Search
all the Treasures of Knowledge for every Thing that is great, wonderful and
magnificent: We can only express our Thoughts of the Creator in the Works of
His Creation; and the brightest of these can only give us some faint Shadows of
his Greatness and His Glory. The strongest Figures are too weak, the most
exalted Language too low to express His ineffable Excellence. No Hyperbole can
Hyperbolical.60
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The sublime theme, as Felton reveals, opens up the issue of the adequacy of prose to be
able to represent its object. Indeed in this work which seeks to chart what constitutes a
‘just composition’, Felton’s strained language on the subject of representing the divine,
weighty and serious as the divine, language fails. But, crucially, such a failure is able to
and socially valid. The unpresentable is able to be represented formerly. But the
content of Felton’s sublime texts, always already exceed such a form. This means that
it is the unpresentable excess that marks the text as culturally valid, rather than the text’s
formal limits. Ultimately Felton invites readers to take up texts on the divine as
inadequate, and incomplete. Felton foregrounds the fragility of formal limits. There is
a sense in which the object of the text actually begins beyond the text’s formal frame.
Whilst it could be argued that Felton’s insistence upon the formal inadequacy of
reading of the sublime implies that texts on the divine necessitate misreading as reading
the ‘rules’ for marking representational failure, opens up the possibility of marking out
cultural validity. Thus the discussions derived from Felton’s early eighteenth-century
work on representational adequacy61 utilise the sublime, and what amounts to the
notion that the English poets — Shakespeare, Milton — are greater than the ancients.
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Shakespeare their equal only in dramatic powers ... There is at least as much Genius on
the British, as on the Grecian stage”.62 In this comparison with the ancients, an
unpresentable to elevate its subjects, that we can begin to unpack the nuances of the
eighteenth-century sublime. My aim at this point will be to briefly show that it is in the
rationalist sublime that the issue of the national character of genius is ultimately forged.
The sublime object emerges, however, through three distinct understandings of the self:
the empirical, the mystical, and the rational. In the first, the self seeks that moment in
which nature and art determine the feeling of elevation.63 Richardson exemplifies what
is at stake in this way of thinking. In the language of the feminine, the sublime
moment, he writes, “Elevates the Soul, gives her a higher Opinion of her Self, and fills
her with Joy, and a Noble kind of Pride, as if her self had produc’d what she is
‘as if’, a pretence which ultimately fails to transcend matter, and instead signals the utter
dependence of the self upon sensory limitations. Burke’s sublime too, buys into the
illusory nature of the moment. Whilst he introduces the idea of ‘terror’ to discussions
on the sublime, and with it the pleasures of transgression (pain), his work ultimately
reduces the sublime to the sensationalist distinctions between pain and its association
with self-preservation, while pleasure “enlists the social passions”.65 Burke contends,
that when at a safe distance “the ruling principle of the sublime” produces “an idea of
pain and danger”66 such that there is a kind of willing suspension of the power of
Reason. The consequent confusion in this liminal moment produces a kind of delight, a
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transgressed. But this transgression is never real, in the sense that Reason is afforded
the kinds of demands that Kant makes. Reason thus remains, after Burke, untouched.
There is a sense in which the Burkean sublime renders the self subject to the
unpresentable — in his text, God — rather than empowered. Hume, likewise, conceives
of the sublime in direct relation to objects, in the sense in which this “opposition not
only enlarges the soul; but the soul, when full of courage and magnanimity, in a manner
seeks opposition”, and proceeds to reduce this ‘enlargement’ of the self to a discussion
cause, the mystical sublime renders the self an object of a greater power. In one
rendering, represented by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, the
“Nature’s wonders serve to excite and perfect this idea of their author … How glorious
it is to contemplate him, in this noblest of works apparent to us, the system of the bigger
world!”.68 Here nature mystically appears as the manifestation of the infinite divine,
which passes over the mortal self, who also occupies this natural space. In
contemplating this moment, the self, as Needler would put it, “refines and elevates our
affections; and inspires us with a certain dignity and virtuous pride, which makes us
despise the low pleasures of sense, and raises us above this transitory scene of things”.69
But perhaps the most stark example of the mystical sublime can be found in Usher, who
denied the possibility of contemplation upon nature, in favour of a feeling of awe that
Usher writes:
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In the disorder and confusion of seas in storms, or when lofty woods struggle with
high winds, we are struck with an humiliating awe, surprize, and suspense: the
mind views the effects of boundless power with still amazement: it recoils upon
itself in a passion made up of terror, joy, and rapture, and feels in sentiment these
Usher situates the self’s elevation in the space in which the mortal self encounters the
passing over of a great yet unknowable power. The self stands in a giant shadow, and,
due to its immensity, is unable to determine its cause. A feeling of elevation thus
attends to this moment. This unconscious excess signals that the self has been touched
by a great object, perhaps the divine himself, as Usher would have it. It is significant
that Usher, whilst he uses Christianity’s personal pronoun to signify this supernatural
greatness, ultimately declares that such a power is unnamable, and cannot be confined
divine idea rising before it in a variety of circumstances, and worshipped it under the
Whilst the empirical and the mystical sublimes sought an external object, upon
which the sublime feeling could be staked, the rational sublime fully adopts its Platonic
roots, and situates the self as the supreme agent in a world of corrupted matter. I would
contend that the sublime doesn’t actually arrive fully until we find it in its rationalist
form. Empiricism in its insistence upon the reign of the sensory is ultimately unable to
elevate the self above the limits of nature. Likewise the mystical sublime, whilst it
makes what could be considered an intermediary step in dislocating the senses, still
locates the self as an object of the “intruded influence of a mighty unknown power”,72
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as Usher put it, an external force. The rationalists, in contrast, attempted to break
through all barriers, in order to allow the self to soar to new heights.
If Hume had argued that the object presented the self with an opportunity to be
an ‘overcomer’, rationalists on the other hand refused to grant the object a status, and
instead focussed upon the deeds of the self. It is in this sense that Addison writes,
“because the Mind of Man requires something more perfect in Matter, than what it finds
there … it is the part of the Poet to humour the Imagination in its own Notions, by
mending and perfecting Nature”.73 Rather than an opposition, the object thus emerges
as a mere site upon which the autonomous imagination freely writes itself. The
rationalists thus championed the imagination as the determining force in human affairs:
Akinside in awe of “the eloquence and graces of Plato” grappled with the powerful,
and Reid considered Homer’s mind sublime, as it “conceived great characters, great
between the subject and the object, mind and matter. The sublime reaches its
penultimate moment when the subject considers itself a determining force, when the
object is subject to the subject. In literary and art criticism this preoccupation with the
supremacy of the subject found form in the idea of the boundlessness of the
imagination, the poetic life, and the relation of the boundless imagination to the work of
art. As such we find characteristics such as novelty, surprise, originality, the new and
the uncommon being championed in both art and life. Critics such as Richard
Blackmore, for instance, valorised epic poetry as the artistic medium in which the
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novelty … is the Parent of Admiration; and it is for this reason, that the
Sentiments in Epick Poetry, which by their Beauty, Strength and Dignity, are
rais’d above the Level of vulgar Conceptions, and are always new, either by
themselves or the uncommon Turn given to them by the Poet, act powerfully upon
a painter should not Please only, but Surprize. … He that would rise to the
Sublime must form an Idea of Something beyond all we have yet seen; or which
Art or Nature has yet produced … Nor must he stop Here, but Create an Original
Idea of Perfection.77
Every thing that is new or uncommon raises a Pleasure in the Imagination, because
it fills the Soul with an agreeable Surprise, gratifies its Curiosity, and gives it an
Baillie adds:
preoccupation with the possibility of an intellectual moment that exceeds the bounds of
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past influences and the existing social order. Thus we find that pervasive emphasis
upon originality and the new in both art and life. The sublime emerges as a
transgressive, and creative force. The capacity to present the unpresentable thus plays a
crucial role in constituting authentic culture. It is striking to find that in this emphasis
upon the possibilities of transgression such a strong confidence in the capacity of the
seems as if such encounters were considered a prerequisite for what we might think of
as an authentic cultural life. Newness for these thinkers affords a mere opportunity for
the powers of the imagination to be extended. Culture thus emerges not as a sphere of
life to be protected from the threat of the unfamiliar (as it appears presently in some
contexts), it is precisely in this ‘threat’ that cultural life is productively forged. As such
culture was to be dynamic, constantly unfolding in its encounters with the new and the
strange.
In the language of Edward Young the productive power of the strange is usefully
staged. He writes:
Our spirits rouze at an Original; that is a perfect stranger, and all throng to learn
what news from a foreign land: and tho’ it comes, like an Indian Prince, adorned
with feathers only, having little of weight; yet of our attention it will rob the more
then are we at the Writer’s mercy; on the strong wing of his Imagination, we are
Pleasure; we have no Home, no Thought, of our own; till the Magician drops his
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Pen: And then falling down into ourselves, we awake to flat Realities, lamenting
as dreamlike — at the same time, however, in this insistence upon the excessive,
unbounded capacity of the imagination we find the trope of homelessness, which in this
instance marks authentic aesthetic experience. This valorisation of both formal and
cultural excess, of unbelonging gives rise to the sublime in its most pervasive form.
This sense of unbelonging finds its own form in the figure of that most
Romantic of figures: the Genius. The figure of the Genius emerges as the cultural
embodiment of the Eighteenth Century demand for the elevation of the self. The self
that is seemingly caught in the trap of sensory limitation, the body in social space, a
“flat reality” as Young put it, finds a moment in the imagination of a chosen few an
Archimedean point outside the limits of the body, which is able to be expressed, for the
benefit of others, in artistic forms. The Genius, Young goes on to explain, “is a Master-
workman” with the power to accomplish “great things without the means generally
find, as I have suggested, the Genius located outside, and in excess of, the common
nature of the everyday. Blackwell reveals the political cogency of the excesses of
unbelongingness:
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in Homer’s days: Arms were in Repute, and Force decided Possession. He saw
Towns taken and plundered, the Men put to the sword, and the Women made
Slaves: He beheld their despairing Faces, and suppliant Postures; heard their
Moanings o’er their murdered Husbands, and Prayers for their Infants to the
Victor. On the other hand, he might view Cities blessed with Peace, Spirited by
Affairs himself, to draw off his Attention; but he wander’d thro’ the various
Blackwell seeks to reveal the tumultuous disorder of the ancient everyday. This
disorder means that social being exists in a constant state of change, ruled as it were by
the yet-to-be-decided, rather than an imposed social order. Homer’s detachment from
this disorder, as observer, enables in the first instance a knowledge of social life that is
not afforded to the self that is caught up in the immediacy of events; and in the second
instance, this knowledge confronts the poet and demands the imposition of an order
that comes only by way of invention, the exercise of the imagination. Of course the
epic form for Blackwell is the upshot of Homer’s unique thought, which is able to be on
the one hand, detached, that is free from social determination, and on the other hand, is
able to rise above the tumultuous disorder to exert the imagination in order to describe
and define the wanton object. We thus hear echoes of Kristeva’s ‘abject edged with the
sublime’.
Significantly Blackwell sets the trope of the Genius, as set forth in his work
upon Homer, against the European civil state. It seems the state, in imposing civil order
has at the same time denied the possibility of the new and the creative. Blackwell
contends:
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The Marvellous and Wonderful is the Nerve of the Epic strain: But what
We know the Springs and Method of acting; Every thing happens in Order, and
Government, or split into many … the Manners are simple, and Accidents will
happen every day: Exposition and loss of Infants, Encounters, Escapes, Rescues,
and every other thing that can inflame the human passions while acting, or awake
them when described, and recalled by Imitation. THESE are not be found in a
Blackwell implicitly champions a kind of social anarchy, or at least insists upon the
of crises, since such moments demand the extension of the Genius’ imaginative powers.
This is perhaps Genius in its most extreme form. As such Blackwell’s implicit anarchy
century aesthetics. The crucial thing about the Genius is that this is a unique self, “the
enviable … chosen few”85, as Kierkegaard put it, who is able to invent, experiment, to
search for a form that is able to accommodate nature’s chaos in a new and compelling
manner. For the Genius nothing is a given, and it truly takes a special kind of mind to
break through existing forms, in order to map contingent meanings. Such a mind, in its
excesses and refusal to be bound, acquires a status on the basis of the sublime, which
ultimately, since any law giving body seems to be antagonistic to the power of the
I have dwelt upon the figure of the Genius in order to show the lawlessness and
the contingency that lies at the core of this understanding of the self. But the Genius
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emerges as a kind of paradox: on the one hand this self is a rebel, and yet at the same
time this rebel commands a reverence. In this rebellion and remapping of the real there
politically driven concept. But it is not a political power whose form imitates the state,
rather the Genius emerges as a kind of social misfit, almost victim to the forces within
that drive the capacity to invent, who, because of this trope of the misfit, commands a
reverence that parallels any priesthood, and exercises exclusive rights over the creative
But it is also crucial to note that it is this kind of social misfit that lies at the core
of the West’s myth of progress, and which is fully realised in Hegel’s Phenomenology
of Spirit. I will take up this issue in subsequent chapters. For the moment what I would
wish to suggest, is that the figure of the eighteenth-century Genius emerges in, what
could be described as, a split and ambivalent space. The Genius is a rebel that is
utilised in the service of Reason, and ultimately the myth of the West’s superiority. I
would thus suggest that what the Genius signals is less radical transgression as an end in
itself, than the notion that art and the artist in the capacity to engage the unpresentable
open up sites for what I have called the fort/da of the myths of nation. In other words,
what the eighteenth-century Genius becomes is that abject other upon which the nation
is able to write itself. The accommodation of such a figure marks the myth of Western
progress and democracy. What Kant does is to take this figure as a model for the
Having established the social location of the discourse of the sublime, I will turn
to the Kantian sublime. As I suggested, Kant takes up the sublime as a noble trope. My
overall purpose in drawing attention to the dignity that the eighteenth-century sublime
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sublime as it emerged in Europe. The sublime is both the object of the discourse of the
postcolonial and a site which opens up the possibility for a cogent politics.
Kant tells us that the sublime cannot be deduced from an object,86 it is a state of
consciousness that concerns the ideas of reason and their relation to the experiential
no sensible form can contain the sublime properly so-called. This concerns only
ideas of the reason which, although no adequate presentation is possible for them,
summoned into the mind. Thus the wide ocean, disturbed by the storm, cannot be
called sublime. Its aspect is horrible; and the mind must be already filled with
sublime, as it is incited to abandon sensibility and to busy itself with ideas that
We call that sublime which is absolutely great … great beyond all comparison. …
if we call anything … absolutely great in every point of view (great beyond all
standard of this outside itself, but merely in itself. … It follows hence that the
sublime is not to be sought in the things of nature, but only in our ideas.88
The sublime moment proceeds from the conflict between the imagination and
reason. In the case of the mathematical sublime this conflict is set forth via the problem
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of the infinite. The infinite number exceeds the limits of the understanding — it is
ungraspable — and as such becomes a problem for reason, since reason’s task is to
make, as Kant tells us, a claim for “absolute totality”.89 The infinite emerges as a
problem because it poses a threat to the capacity of Reason, and in doing so raises the
notion that nature is actually more powerful than the self. In this moment the possibility
of the total breakdown of Reason is effected. Pascal’s boast, which opens this chapter,
collapses. But in contrast to the mystical sublime, which insists that in this breakdown
itself there is a feeling of elevation, Kant rather than being crushed, defeated, and given
over to what he would perceive as blind superstition, or what Holbach called the
“savage … just like the dog who gnaws the stone … without recurring to the hand by
which it was thrown … unaccustomed to reason with precision”,90 embraces this pain
and finds in it the possibility of the final elevation of the self over the senses. He
triumphantly announces:
there is in our imagination a striving toward infinite progress and in our reason a
claim for absolute totality, regarded as a real idea, therefore this very
inadequateness for that idea in our faculty for estimating the magnitude of things
The possibility of this sense of excitement in the face of the possibility of a miserable
order to furnish the understanding with an idea of the infinite. In other words, where the
senses fail Reason is able to triumphantly demonstrate its great power. Kant declares
93
the mere ability to think which shows a faculty of the mind surpassing every
standard of sense.92
For Kant there is thus a faculty of mind that is comparable to the infinite. In
Kant’s Christian context, with its insistence upon the finiteness of the self, and the
overcoming power of the mystical, this celebration of the infinite capacity of the ideas is
consciousness, however, the subversive capacity of the Kantian self is put to a different
use: namely, as its logic implies, the supremacy of the European self.
The feeling of the sublime is thus constituted by both the feeling of pain,
“arising from the want of accordance between the aesthetical estimation of magnitude
formed by the imagination and the estimation of the same formed by reason”, and, in
the same instant, a feeling of “pleasure … arising from the correspondence with rational
ideas of this very judgement of the inadequacy of our greatest faculty of sense”. 93 The
upshot of this seeming crises merely affords the self’s recognition of its own grand
status in relation to the objects of sense. Remarkably the failure of the imagination,
Reason elevates the self above the mud and the slime of this world. It relishes in its
encounter with the excessive, since such moments merely occasion the unlimited
it is a law for us to strive after these ideas. In fact it is for us a law (of reason) and
94
great for us; and that which arouses in us the feeling of this supersensible
The failure of the imagination thus serves a useful, perhaps necessary, purpose.
Reason reveals its remarkable power in, and only in, those moments in which its own
there is a challenge. Having set forth the mathematical sublime in order to underscore
the infinite capacity of the ideas, Kant then turns to the dynamical sublime, which
emerges not just as a threat to knowledge, as in the mathematical, but to the freedom of
the self.
poses a threat to the self. Kant locates the sublime moment in the possibility of resisting
the fear that nature as might effects upon the experiential manifold. Rather than flee the
danger, Kant argues that it is possible to “regard an object as fearful without being
afraid of it”. This possibility again concerns Reason’s capacity to exceed the objects of
sense. To overcome fear, which is the task of the dynamical sublime, it is necessary not
to physically resist, but to think resistance. The example furnished by Kant involves,
what he calls the virtuous man, who “fears God without being afraid of Him, because to
wish to resist Him and His commandments he thinks is a case that he need not
apprehend”.95 What is at stake then is the idea of freedom, which arises in the capacity
of Reason to be dutiful to the moral law, as an exulted disposition, since the self in
But as Kant puts the issue of freedom on the line, which is threatened by nature
as might, the possibility that nature has dominion over the self produces a language
which becomes increasingly preoccupied not with the idea of the Romantic artist, but
with the idea of the heroic conqueror. Of course I must point out before we proceed any
95
further, that this sense of the conqueror, strictly speaking, relates in Kant to the ability
of the self to conquer the fear that is furnished by the senses in the face of a fearful
object. But having made this necessary qualification, it is important to consider what
these fearful objects of consciousness might be. It is in this sense that we find the
system is drawn up around what makes the self susceptible to the Ideas. I would thus
contend that this susceptibility arises in that moment in which Reason is faced with an
obstacle, a threat that demands to be overcome. Without the possibility of the failure of
the imagination, and a threat to freedom, Reason merely functions as a sleeping giant.
The Kantian self without the sublime would be like Plato’s Republic without the cave,
and that sense of elevation that underpins the notion of the state as the apogee of human
civilisation:
noblest natures. They must be made to climb the ascent to the vision of Goodness,
It is thus significant that in the threat posed upon the self by an excessive might, Kant
speaks of “resistance”, “courage”, and the “superiority” of the self in relation to the
immensity of the object.97 Here we find the heroic figure, “the man who shrinks from
nothing, who fears nothing, and therefore does not yield to danger, but rather goes to
face it vigorously with the most complete deliberation”, as Kant put it. Significantly it
is the soldier that embodies this quality, more so than the “statesman”, since “his mind
crises, and the possibility of the suspension of civil order, as an indispensable moment
96
in the formation of Reason’s authority. Without such, Kant concludes, the reasonable
self begins to be ruled by a “cowardice, and effeminacy” that “debases the disposition
of the people”.99
In addition this valorisation of the man of war, Kant qualifies this quality, and
contends that in this capacity to overcome danger, we find the bedrock of civilisation.
Culture, understood in that old fashion Arnoldian sense as the best that can be thought
and known, arises in the development of moral ideas. Without moral ideas, Kant
contends, “that which we, prepared by culture, call sublime presents itself to the
uneducated man merely as terrible”.100 The sublime thus emerges as a marker of a civil
sensibility. It clears a space for society to be able to consider itself free from the
certain nobility is thus afforded in the sublime moment. It is worth quoting Kant at
length. He writes:
The idea of the good conjoined with [strong] affection is called enthusiasm. This
state of mind seems to be sublime, to the extent that we commonly assert that
mind that operates far more powerfully and lastingly than the impulse arising
from sensible representations. But (which seems strange) the absence of affection
far preferable way, because it has also on its side the satisfaction of pure reason.
A mental state of this kind is alone called noble; and this expression is
presence, etc., when these do not so much arouse astonishment … and this is the
97
case when ideas agree in their presentation undesignedly and artlessly with the
aesthetical satisfaction.101
I have contended that the sublime is built upon, after Longinus, that need for the
self to feel more purposeful than the objects employed in daily existence. The capacity
to present the unpresentable in literature signals that a ‘higher’ purpose has been
attained. In its extreme the pain and pleasure of the sublime enables an understanding
of the mind as the determining force of the actions of the self, rather than the lifeless
matter in which the self dwells and of which the self consists. Crucially the
boundlessness of the aesthetic imagination, with its ability to call forth, in a divine-like
fashion, the new, to be creative, emerges as that moment in which sublime possibilities
are opened up. These possibilities are realised in the figure of the Genius, who, in
mind. But the aesthetic imagination cannot be confined to art alone. To confine the
poetic life to art is to miss what has been central in discussions concerning the sublime
since its inauguration, and its political cogency for a thinker such as Kant. For not only
does the aesthetic concern art, it also, and in most instances without distinction, refers to
the capacity of the self to rise above danger and overcome threats. The sublime can
After the French revolution Kant dominates thinking upon the Romantic
endeavour to carve out a specific social space for Art.102 “It was not until Kant that the
realm of aesthetics assumed its own rights,” Ernst Behler points out. The romantic self
glorification of creative imagination — and made of the artist a spokesman for the
godhead, an orphic seer, and prophetic priest”.103 For M. H. Abrams the ‘Kantian
98
revolution’ involved a change from a mimetic theory of art to a Romantic theory of art
represent nature, the artist attempts to give an outward form to the self’s inner life.104
But whilst the Romantic self that was set forth in the Eighteenth Century is
seizing Kant’s insistence upon the disinterested nature of reflective judgement, paved
the way for ‘Kantian autonomy’ and the Romantic revolution in art — what Bennett
points to is that other dark metaphor that lurks within the corridors of thinking on the
sublime imagination. This is, as I have suggested in my engagement with Kant, the
most striking things about discourses on the sublime is that at every turn they abound
with salutary images of: “the clash of numerous Armies, and the voice of War”;106 the
“military glory”.112
authority. This much has been said concerning Romantic art (Coleridge, Arnold), but it
can also be stated in the context of European capitalist and colonial expansion. The
sublime insistence upon the sacrificial willingness of Reason effectively establishes the
99
assurance that accompanies the images of war and the heroic conqueror suggests that
this is the case. There does not seem to be any question that the violence that is implicit
in these images of sublime thoughts and deeds are in any sense defective, or unjust. In
the problem of the relation between virtue and power, as in John Baillie’s influential
“An Essay on the Sublime”, the sublime merely emerges as all the more powerful, since
Baillie asserts that “sublime passions, when virtuous, are so by association and
accident”.113 This means that truth and virtue do not necessarily correspond. Whilst
there is the possibility that power can be abused, as in the case of Caligula
“commanding armies to fill their helmets with cockle-shells”, and “Alexander laying
level towns, depopulating countries, and ravaging the whole world”, a truly sublime
power, for Baillie, emerges in and through what could be considered power in itself, the
master over his slaves, is a power nothing grand, yet at the same time authority in a
prince is sublime”, since the prince’s authority extends “to multitudes, and from nations
state of the mind of the artistic Genius. One wonders why Baillie is so careful to avoid
conflating power and virtue. Given the colonial self that haunts discussion on the
sublime, I would suggest that this careful avoidance arises simply because the
conflation of power and virtue robs the sublime of its most important ingredient: a
same time, to impose a willing limit, such as virtue, is to be even more sublime than
abject expressions of unlimited power. As such the virtuous prince, who exercises what
seems like unlimited power over the nations, in being a creature of virtue, of
benevolence, is only all the more sublime. Kantian freedom, which emerges via duty to
the moral law, is sublime precisely because there is always the possibility that this duty
100
can be subverted, not in terms of a sensory determination, but in terms of the unlimited
Dissertations Moral and Critical. Here the figure of Ulysses, the prince, embodies
metaphor for thinking through what is at stake in Kant’s conservative use of the
sublime, when, in walking into the palace, disguised like a beggar, he is insulted,
and even kicked, by one of his own slaves, who was in the service of those rebels
that were tempting his queen, plundering his household, and alienating the
affections of his people. Homer tells us, that the hero stood firm, without being
moved from his place by the stroke; that he deliberated for a moment, whether he
should at one blow fell the traitor to the earth; but that patience and prudential
thoughts restrained him. The brutal force of the Cyclops is not near so striking as
this picture.115
Ulysses possesses what seems like a limitless power, at least in this context. Disguised
as something that he clearly is not he must be content, if he is to reign upon the throne
that belongs to him, to bide his time. The Kantian self with its sensory limitations
possesses a faculty of mind that is not determined by that body, with its visceral
demands, its finiteness. Reason stands firm, refusing to be moved by that finiteness,
It is in this sacrificial sense that the sublime becomes a crucial moment in the
101
human with a body, yet not simply that. The colonial self is ‘powerful’, yet a reluctant
servant. Whilst the subtle movements of thought in Kant are set forth via a language
built upon a problematic whose major aim is to draw up a chain of command, to find an
authoritative space for the reign of Reason in human affairs, Reason ultimately utilises
sublimity to engender its authority over the senses, danger, and the strange and
unfamiliar. As such the Kantian self coincides with the emergence of European’s
understanding of itself as the most significant figure of humanity on the global scene.
the process determines the ideas that would justify it, it is the case that capitalism
coincided with the emergence of the sublime self that Kant championed. Armed with
reason’s sublime ideas, the Kantian self was staged in the context of eighteenth-century
Europe searching for foreign markets. It is thus a timely self in the sense that it
provides an impetus for Europe to reign supreme in what was, essentially, the
reactionary metaphor.
boost “demand for manufacturers to meet the needs of the settlers in both”. Magdoff
continues:
At the heart of this wave of expansion was the slave trade. The prosperity of the
extremely profitable sugar plantations was based on the import of African slaves
102
export markets and the trade in merchandise and slaves, under monopoly
conditions secured through war, control of the seas, and political domination.116
In this light, Kant’s critical problematic occupies the contrapuntal convergence of the
(hankered after?) finding a moment in which it was possible to overcome the object,
Kant takes all of the issues that emerged in these discussions, disconnects the aesthetic
from the object, and opens the door for Reason’s artful domination of not only
consciousness, but the acts of the self in the world. The empirical hero attempted to
overcome the world, the Kantian hero creates one. There is lurking within discourses
on the sublime a certain logic, which demands that encounters with difference are
in two ways: on the one hand, the mirror opened up a space for questioning the figure of
the nation, on the other, the mirror can be understood as an insertion of the question of
exile into the process of Reason’s grapple with what it considers its dark side. I have
taken the latter path and inhabited Kant’s edges in order to draw out the pragmatic
excesses of his logical philosophy. I would thus wish to hold up this pragmatic excess
as a problematic object for the postcolonial. Kant, whilst obviously not the only key
figure in the emergence of the European Enlightenment, stands in for a particular mode
most scathing critique of such thinking in Bennett’s Painting for a New Republic (The
Inland Sea) emerges inside the subjectivity of the dispossessed self. Residing over
carefully laid out skulls and bones — the horror of genocide — we see the pyramid of
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logical thought, its violence laid bare. Thus what Bennett calls forth is a re-reading of
Kantian thought as a violent social force. But this violence emerges as less a fixed
disposition than a dynamic process, in which slippages and excesses, reason’s dark side,
The in-between mirror of the dispossessed self can be read, in terms of its
questioning capacity, as a search for a space from which to speak. It is significant that
Bennett looks upon both the space of Kant’s dynamic, in which the figure of the exile
insufficient for this purpose. The identity of this dispossessed self emerges in the in-
inserted into the Kantian equation. As Kant establishes the moral and epistemological
preoccupations with its own dark side. What basis for a secure authority is this? The
excesses that Reason seeks to overcome, in such a question, emerge as less natural
residues of the Enlightenment self — the rationalism that teeters on the brink of
madness and the bodily desire that reason sacrifices (which nevertheless remain as
important markers of what reason is not) — than the products of reason’s own process.
In other words, rather than a golden order (culture) established in relation to a hostile
and confusing nature, Kantian thought emerges as a violent force itself. Bennett’s
refusal to contend with Reason as a fixity, and focus upon the conscious obstacles to
reason’s legitimate employment, its excesses, means that these excesses are not the
products of nature, but the products of reason’s discourse itself. Here an interesting
wrests the sublime from its natural status in the Eighteenth Century, and makes it a
social issue that belongs to today. It will now be necessary to move on to consider the
104
undertake this task, I will turn to the work of Frantz Fanon, specifically his complex
Notes
1
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1966), 95.
2
Gordon Bennett, Painting for a New Republic (The Inland Sea), (Perth: Art Gallery of
Western Australia, 1994).
3
Ian Mclean, and Gordon Bennett, The Art of Gordon Bennett (Roseville, East, NSW:
Craftsman House, 1996), 71.
4
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (London: Routledge, 1994), 145.
5
In my research I also considered the work of Conrad as a ‘way into’ the texts of Kant.
He certainly relies upon the centrality of Idealism in his attack upon European civility.
Ultimately, however, such a critique remains flawed. His evoking of the centrality of
unpresentable moment (the sublime), cannot be separated from what preoccupied
eighteenth-century literary theory. As I will show in chapter two, the capacity to
present the unpresentable through various formal strategies was central in the
construction of the national character of Genius. It is difficult to find a moment in
“Heart of Darkness” that contests this notion. One of the difficulties with Conrad is that
his work foregrounds and reinforces the necessity of conservative aesthetic
constructions. At the edges of the novella there is a nagging Kantian aesthetic, that
would render the social world an aesthetic rather than a material problem. It could be
that ultimately Conrad is ‘more Kantian than Kant’ in his insistence upon the power of
the imagination. For further discussion on the difficulty of Conrad, compare: Chinua
Achebe, “An Image of Africa”, Research in African Literatures, vol. 9, no. 1 (1978), 1-
15; Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary
Frontiers (Houndsmill: The Macmillan Press, 1983); Sarah Cole, “Conradian
Alienation and Imperial Intimacy”, Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 44, no. 2 (1998), 251-
281; Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: Verso, 1976), 135; Hunt
Hawkins, “Conrad and the Psychology of Colonialism”, in Conrad Revisited: Essays for
the Eighties, ed. Ross Murfin (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 86;
Ezekiel Mphahlele, The African Image (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 125; and D. C.
R. A. Goonetilleke, Developing Countries in British Fiction (London: Macmillan,
1977), 1.
6
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London:
Macmillan, 1933), 66.
7
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F J. Payne
(New York: Dover Publications, 1966), 529.
8
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991); Ernest Gellner,
Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 56; Eric Hobsbawm, and
Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1983), 7.
105
9
Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative
Discourse (London: Zed Press, 1986), 17.
10
Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of
Transcendence (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 11.
11
Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’”, trans. H. B.
Nisbet, in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), 54.
12
Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order (New York: New York
University Press, 1984), 36.
13
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1989). 187, 193.
14
Etienne Bonnot Abbé de Condillac, “A Treatise on the Sensations”, trans. Franklin
Philip, Philosophical Writings of Etienne Bonnot Abbé de Condillac (Hillsdale, New
Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1982), 332, 339.
15
Gottfried Wilhelm Von Leibniz, Monadology, trans. George R. Montgomery (La
Salle, Illinois: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1902), §7.
16
Leibniz, Monadology, §17.
17
Leibniz, Monadology, § 56, § 78.
18
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed.
John Butt (London: Methuen & Co, 1954), vol. 3, part 1, 61.
19
See Kant’s controversial Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793), trans.
Theodore M. Greene and Hoyte H. Hudson (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), in which
he insists that the moral nature of the self should be derived via “the subjective ground
of the exercise (under objective moral laws) of man’s freedom in general”. This
insistence upon freedom is driven by the failure of empiricism to provide a basis for
moral accountability. Kant argues, that the subjective ground which determines moral
action “must itself always be an expression of freedom (for otherwise the use or abuse
of man’s power of choice in respect of the moral law could not be imputed to him nor
could the good or bad in him be called moral)” (16-17).
20
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 45-46.
21
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 17.
22
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 532-533.
23
See John Locke’s foundational An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2. vols.
(New York: Dover Publishers, 1959). This ‘inquiry into the original certainty and
extent of human knowledge’, sets forth what could be considered the law of the
formation of human ideas. The work begins by rejecting Descartes’ suggestion that
106
ideas are innate “characters, as it were, stamped upon the mind of man, which the soul
receives in its very first being; and brings into the world with it ” (vol. 1, 37). Instead
he proposes that ideas arise either as the direct product of sense impressions - as a
photographic film responds to light - or as the reflection of the mind on such evidence
as the senses provided. The former is deemed the ‘sensory’ faculty of the mind, the
“senses [that] ... convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things”(vol. 1,
122), whilst the latter is deemed the ‘reflective’, “the perceptions of the operation of our
own mind’s within us, as it is employed about the ideas it has got”(vol. 1, 123). For
Locke, “these ... contain our whole stock of ideas ... we have nothing in our minds
which did not come in one of these two ways”(vol. 1, 124-125). Locke thus presents
the mind as a blank slate which contains no a priori structures. Human subjects, as
Claude Helvetius concurs, are considered to be “born without ideas, without passions,
and without other wants than those of hunger and thirst, and consequently without
character” (Claude Adrien Helvetius, “Men are Reasonable”, in The Portable Age of
Reason Reader, ed. Crane Brinton (New York: The Viking Press, 1969), 262).
24
I follow Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1978) on this point. For Williams Descartes’ assumption concerning
knowledge’s foundation in his own mind leads him into an unreliable subjectivity. To
establish knowledge as a certainty it was thus necessary for him to rise above sensory
experience (I note the sublime at work here) in order to find a standpoint from which to
deal with the thing-in-itself as it actually is. This sense of elevation can be understood
as the ‘absolute’ perspective, which only the faculty of Reason can provide. For
Williams this is the ‘hidden’ meaning of Descartes doctrine of ‘clear and distinct’ ideas
as it appears in Principles of Philosophy (particularly the first part). Descartes assumes
that the thing-in-itself is actually as it appears to reason. Kant takes issue with this
doctrine.
25
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 257.
26
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 258, 259.
27
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 176.
28
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 472.
29
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 56.
30
Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics that can Qualify as a
Science, trans. Paul Carus (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company, 1902),
98.
31
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 271, 272.
32
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 272.
33
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (New Jersey:
Prentice Hall, 1993), 44.
34
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 545-546.
107
35
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 550.
36
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 312-313.
37
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 465.
38
David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), ed. Charles W.
Hendel (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1955), 92-93.
39
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 32.
40
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 29.
41
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 32-33.
42
Kant, Prolegomena, 49.
43
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner
Press, 1951), 24-25.
44
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 12.
45
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 15, 16,17.
46
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 31.
47
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 191.
48
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 284.
49
Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth
Rottenburg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 50-56.
50
Friedrich von Schiller, On the Sublime, trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Ungar
Publishing Co., 1966), 211.
51
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 98.
52
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 104.
53
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 28-29.
54
See for instance Hugh Blair’s, A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the
Son of Fingal (1756, reprint. New York: Garland, 1970), 120.
55
Frances Reynolds, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste and of the Origin
of Our Ideas of Beauty (1785, reprint; New York: Garland Publishing, 1972), 5.
56
James Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783, reprint; New York: Garland
Publishing, 1971), 606.
108
57
John Baillie, “An Essay on the Sublime”, in The Sublime: A Reader in British
Eighteenth- Century Aesthetic Theory, ed. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 88.
58
Plato, Phaedo, trans. R. Hackworth, in Greek Philosophy: Thales to Aristotle, ed.
Reginald E. Allen (New York: The Free Press 1991), 162.
59
Paul Henry Theiry Baron d’ Holbach, The System of Nature; or the Laws of the Moral
and Physical World, trans. M. De Mirabaud (London: R. Helder, 1821), vol 2. 6-116.
60
Henry Felton, A Dissertation on Reading the Classics and Forming a Just Style
(London: Jonah Bowyer, 1713), 125-126.
61
See also John Constable, Reflections upon Accuracy of Style, (London: Henry Lintot,
1731); John Mason, Essay on the Power of Numbers (1749, reprint. New York: Garland
Publishing, 1970); and William Kenrick, Introduction to the School of Shakespeare
(1749, reprint. New York: Garland Publishing, 1970).
62
Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759, reprint. Leeds: The
Scolar Press, 1966), 79.
63
Eighteenth-century empiricists had set themselves the task of finding what object
corresponded to, and gave rise to the sublime feeling. In the wake of Longinus’
influential work on the sublime, which fails, as John Dennis laments, to “directly tell us,
what the sublime is”, and instead “takes a great deal of pains to set before us, the effects
which it produces in the minds of Men” (John Dennis, The Advancement of Modern
Poetry: A Critical Discourse (1704, reprint. New York: Garland Publishing, 1971), 47)
the empiricists produced a mass of writing preoccupied with what constitutes sublime
objects. As such, natural formations such as, mountains, the ocean, the vastness of the
night sky, and the formal qualities of epic poetry and prose, were championed. Kant’s
response, however, to what he understood as empiricism’s failure, namely the
impossibility of both the elevation of the self that is attended to by the sublime and its
natural determination, was not to reject its effect, it was to allow the feeling of
elevation, as Longinus had proclaimed (See Longinus, “On the Sublime”, in Classical
Literary Criticism, trans. T. S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 100) to soar to
new heights. Kant takes this problem concerning consciousness of the object, and
merely recasts the sublime moment, in Idealist fashion, as a problem concerning the
subtle movements of consciousness itself.
64
Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting (1725, reprint. Menston:
Scolar Press, 1971), 256.
65
Graig Howes, “Burke, Poe, and ‘Usher’: The Sublime and Rising Woman”, Emerson
Society Quarterly, no. 31 (1985), 174.
66
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime
and The Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958),
58, 51.
109
67
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1888), 434-435.
68
Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, “Characteristics”, in The
Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth- Century Aesthetic Theory, eds. Andrew
Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 74-75.
69
Henry Needler, “On the excellency of Divine Contemplation”, in The Sublime: A
Reader in British Eighteenth- Century Aesthetic Theory, ed. Andrew Ashfield and Peter
de Bolla, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 81.
70
James Usher, Clio; or, a Discourse on Taste (1769, reprint. New York: Garland
Publishing, 1970), 111-112.
71
Usher, Clio; or, a Discourse on Taste, 122.
72
Usher, Clio; or, a Discourse on Taste, 113.
73
Joseph Addison, The Spectator (No. 418, Monday, June 30, 1712), (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1965), vol. 3, 569.
74
Mark Akinside, The Pleasures of the Imagination: A Poem (London: R. Dodsley,
1744), 102-104n.
75
Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785, reprint. New York:
Garland Publishing, 1971), 732.
76
Sir Richard Blackmore, Essays Upon Several Subjects (1716, reprint. New York:
Garland Publishing, 1971), 36-37.
77
Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting, 257, 259-260, 261.
78
Addison, The Spectator (No. 412, Monday, June 23, 1712), vol. 3, 541.
79
Baillie, “An Essay on the Sublime”, 91.
80
Edward Young, Conjectures on the Original Composition (1759, reprint. Menston:
The Scolar Press, 1966), 12-13.
81
Young, Conjectures on the Original Composition, 25-28. See also Usher’s Clio; or,
a Discourse on Taste, 105-106 , in which Usher employs the trope of the Genius, who
finds “little satisfaction in the philosophy of colleges and schools” to legitimate his
work upon, what I have called, the mystical sublime.
82
See also William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius (1767, reprint. New York:
Garland Publishing, 1971), 150-179.
83
Thomas Blackwell, An Inquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735, reprint.
New York: Garland, 1970), 23.
84
Blackwell, An Inquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer, 26-27.
110
85
Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, ed. trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H.
Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 326.
86
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 83.
87
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 83-84.
88
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 86, 88.
89
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 88.
90
Holbach, The System of Nature, vol 2. 96.
91
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 88.
92
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 89.
93
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 96.
94
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 96.
95
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 100.
96
Plato, The Republic, trans. F. M. Cornford, in Greek Philosophy: Thales to Aristotle,
ed. Reginald E. Allen, (New York: The Free Press, 1991), 228.
97
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 100-101.
98
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 102.
99
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 102.
100
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 105.
101
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 112-113.
102
See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, ed. James Engwell, and W. Jackson Bate (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), part 2, 13; and Matthew Arnold, “The Function of
Criticism at the Present Time”, in Prose of the Victorian Period, ed. William Buckler
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), 425, 429, 433, 440-441.
103
Ernst Behler, German Romantic Criticism, ed. A. Leslie Willson (New York:
Continuum, 1882), viii-ix
104
See M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical
Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1953).
105
See Samuel Holt Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century
England (Ann Abor: University of Michigan Press, 1960).
111
106
Hildebrand Jacob, The Works of Hildebrand Jacob (London: R. Dodsley, 1735), 425.
107
Joseph Addison, The Spectator (no. 417, Saturday, June 28, 1712), vol. 3, 564.
108
Cooper, “Characteristics”, 77.
109
Baillie, “An Essay on the Sublime”, 19.
110
Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (1759, reprint. New York: Garland Publishing,
1970), 15.
111
Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and belles lettres (1785, reprint. New York:
Garland Publishing, 1970), vol. 1, 148.
112
Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 600.
113
Baillie, “An Essay on the Sublime”, 26.
114
Baillie, “An Essay on the Sublime”, 20, 21.
115
Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical, 628.
116
Harry Magdoff, Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1978), 103-104. It must be pointed out that Magdoff’s
historical survey of this period of capitalist expansion, whilst useful, ignores the
indentured labourers taken from India, to work in the sugar plantations of Fiji and the
West Indies.
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Kant’s text attests to this. In the Critique of Judgement we read what appears to be
an innocent anecdote that seeks to exemplify the subjective cause of laughter. Kant
writes: “if a wag … describes very circumstantially the grief of the merchant returning
from India to Europe with all his wealth in merchandise who was forced to throw it
overboard in a heavy storm, and who grieved thereat so much that his wig turned grey
the same night, we laugh and it gives us gratification” (Kant, Critique of Judgement,
178). What we find here is a direct reference to Europe’s capitalist expansion, that
remains, in the context of the work a mere, innocent, exemplification of a philosophical
point, precisely because Europe’s emergence as a dominating power is taken as a given.
This social structure must be in place for Kant’s example to work in this instance, and it
so unquestionably.
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Chapter Three
As long as we have what satisfies the will or only promises satisfaction, we never
reach the production of works of genius … Only when desires and hopes come to
nothing, unchangeable privation shows itself, and the will has to remain
The previous chapter on Kant and the sublime demonstrated that reason is not a
fixed entity with a specific content but can be considered a dynamic process that is
directed toward a certain end. I maintained that the capacity of reason to establish a
subjective unity in the face of the sublime engenders its authoritative status. In the
context of an excess of sensory experience and the lofty susceptibility of the Ideas,
Kant’s claim to have established subjective unity as a basis for epistemological and
moral certainty equates to authoritative being. I also maintained that this authority
coincided with the rise of European individualism and colonial desire. This means that
the trope of the sublime emerges as a conservative discourse in the service of reason.
At this point in the thesis it will be necessary, therefore, to continue mapping reason’s
to be understood in terms of the dynamic that the sublime brings to the establishment of
its authority. In the terms that I set forth in chapter one, a postcolonial critique must
moment in constructing postmodern critical strategies (as I will show in the following
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chapter), I would wish to question such strategies. The notion that the sublime is a vital
moment in establishing reason’s authority suggests that the postmodern fails to account
for the political nuances of reason. I would contend that within the orbit of postcolonial
discourse an alternative politics can be found. In order to map this politics it will be
necessary to turn to the work of Fanon, specifically his work on Hegel. What Gordon
Bennett’s work underscores so strongly is the notion that Kant’s use of the sublime is
part of a logic that does not seem to be able to distinguish between effects and
processes. It seems that Kant has taken reason’s violent effects as a pre-given
condition, as that which precedes reason. But as Bennett shows, rather than a logical
sublime emerges in the context of cultural desire, one directly implicated in Europe’s
colonial expansion.
The discourse of the sublime thus does not end with Kant, since it opens up the
significant that Kant’s formulation of the authoritative reasonable self was subject to a
constant reworking. Despite charting the limits of the knowing self and the dignity of
the moral self, Kant’s work in its use of the sublime also opens up the anxiousness that I
concerning the authority of the Western self is nowhere more apparent than in Hegel. In
his work the aesthetic of the sublime and its relation to reason takes a dramatic turn, and
attempts to prop up the Kantian self, to establish the social authority of this self. I
would contend that Hegel’s discontent with Kant is animated by a desire for European
superiority. And since such a desire is driven by what I have called an anxiousness,
Hegel’s work also reveals the vulnerability of the Western imagination. As a critique of
Kant, Hegel’s work presents crucial possibilities for the discourse of the postcolonial,
specifically for what I would wish to call the postcolonial sublime. Through Fanon’s
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critique of Hegel’s critique of Kant the postcolonial sublime begins to emerge. Fanon is
particularly pivotal in this regard. His engagement with Hegelian thought opens up a
complex critical formation that exceeds the formulations of Idealism. In contrast to the
quiet confidence of Kant’s use of the sublime and Hegel’s anxiousness, the excesses
that Fanon evokes can be understood in terms of Moraru’s parallel model as the
postcolonial sublime.
liberation struggles, Hegel, as I will show, will be much more profitable. But rather
than take up Hegel as a theoretical framework that provides a basis for political
thinking, I would wish to trace, what can be considered, Fanon’s ambivalent relation to
Hegel. The famous master and slave relationship, to which I will turn, appears as a
crucial formulation of the dynamism that marks reason’s outworking. Here Fanon’s
direct engagement in Hegel provides a useful basis for marking out what is at stake in
the discourse of the postcolonial, its grapple with Western reason. Fanon works through
and problematises the metaphor of the Hegelian slave. In this chapter I would wish to
draw out the sublime as it appears in Hegel’s work, the cultural and social nuances that
surround it, and then turn to Fanon’s complex and provocative engagement in it. Whilst
that is in keeping with European individualism and colonial expansion, there emerges a
Before turning directly to the master and slave relationship, the site upon which
this construction of the postcolonial sublime will begin, I will foreshadow my reading
with a general consideration of Hegel’s basic philosophical aim. I will then turn to
consider Hegelian desire, and the conflict of the self that was crucial for Fanon. In the
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context of the thesis ! mapping the postcolonial sublime ! Hegel’s reformulation of
Kant can be considered as a re-situation of the sublime. If in Kant the sublime relates to
the problem of conscious unity, in Hegel, as I would wish to show, the sublime is a
social problem. Rather than radically depart from Kantian thought, Hegel’s sublime can
“Hegel’s position is in fact ‘more Kantian than Kant himself’ — it adds nothing to the
Kantian notion of the sublime; it merely takes it more literally than Kant himself”.215
This philosophy ... made a start at letting reason itself exhibit its own
philosophy ... was overawed by the object, and so the logical determinations were
given an essentially subjective significance with the result that these philosophies
remained burdened with the object they had avoided and were left with the residue
For Hegel, Kant is fundamentally a formalist. In the concern with the a priori structures
of thought, from Hegel’s perspective Kant had produced the situation in which the
thing-in-itself was actually alienated from the thought of the self. This means that
based as it is upon the world of appearances alone, and the work of the aesthetic
judgement, does not seem to account for the outworking of reason in the social world.
Hegel thus asks: how is it that reason is able to produce political, epistemological, and
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such an (obvious) unity is made manifest in the social world. In such a manifestation
reason emerges not just as a legislator of consciousness, but as a power that is able to
transform the world. It is clear that Hegel has Europe’s ‘great’ cultural and political
desire to ‘keep up’, as it were, with the pace of Western progress. He writes, Kant
“considers logic ... to be fortunate in having attained so early a completion before any
other sciences; since Aristotle, it has not lost any ground, but neither has it gained any”.
But in embracing what was considered the advanced state of European Reason in
comparison to the ancients (a thinking strategy that was crucial, as I showed in chapter
two, in the construction of British national pride) Hegel declares, “if logic has not
undergone any change since Aristotle ... then surely the conclusion which should be
drawn is that it is all the more in need of a total reconstruction; for spirit, after its
labours over two thousand years, must have attained to a higher consciousness”.217
Kant’s insistence upon the distinction between the thing-in-itself and the world of
appearances. He asserts that the two worlds are inseparable. Thus rather than two
distinct spheres that have no direct relation, as it appears in Kant, Hegel argues that the
had sought to limit the capacity of the Ideas (they work merely upon the concepts of the
understanding), for Hegel the “Idea is what is true in and for itself, the absolute unity of
Concept and Objectivity”. Rather than an abstract entity teetering, as Kant thought, on
the brink of madness, “the Idea”, Hegel asserts, “is essentially concrete, because it is the
free Concept that determines itself and in doing so makes itself real”. This means the
Hegelian self is caught up in its materiality, its body, its desire for the object. Escaping
this materiality into a bodiless world of lofty and esoteric thought is an impossibility.
The problem of the self for Hegel is, therefore, less a problem of impending madness
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than a problem that concerns the body, and the possibility of bringing the body into the
unity of thought. The ideas accomplish such a task. Therein lies their authority, their
truth as truth. As Hegel puts it, the “Idea can be grasped as reason ... and further as the
Subject-Object, as the unity of the ideal and the real, of the finite and the infinite, of the
soul and the body, as the possibility that has its actuality in itself”.218
Thought thus cannot exist without the thing-in-itself, and vice versa. Like two
sides of a coin, thought is the thing-in-itself and the thing-in-itself is thought. This
odds with the thing-in-itself as it is presented to thought. This is a conflict that the
For consciousness is, on the one hand, consciousness of the object, and on the
consciousness of its knowledge of the truth. Since both are for the same
object or not.219
This comparison, disjunction of the thought upon the object and the object of thought,
must somehow resolve. As Kant refused the possibility of knowing the thing-in-itself,
the conflictual nature of consciousness as set forth in Kant’s antinomies, is one of the
resolution is both necessary and immanent. Built upon what could be considered
Idealism’s central tenet, the notion, in the words of Friedrich Schlegel, that there is an
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“intrinsic dualism and duplicity … so deeply … rooted in our consciousness, that even
when we are … alone, we still think as two, and are constrained as it were to recognise
221
our inmost profoundest being as essentially dramatic”, Hegel’s Idealism unfolds in
the dramatic conflicts that constitute consciousness. Such conflicts enable a theory of
consciousness built upon the dramatic as a kind of dynamic structure that produces a
preoccupied with the possibility of the autonomy and the authority of the European self,
it can be seen that Hegel works toward the same end. This means that Fanon’s
concerning the postcolonial sublime, Fanon’s work seizes the vulnerability that I have
suggested is at the core of Western reason, and disrupts the basis for its ‘great
attainments’. As I will show, Fanon wrests the sublime from its conservative trajectory
For Hegel the condition of conflict means that selfhood is not stagnant, but
If the comparison shows that these two moments do not correspond to one
another, it would seem that consciousness must alter its knowledge to make it
conform to the object. But, in fact, in the alteration of the knowledge, the object
alters for it too, for the knowledge that was present was essentially a knowledge
of the object: as the knowledge changes, so too does the object, for it essentially
In the slippage between knowledge and the object, consciousness through time is able to
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proceed, if it is to function legitimately, in a legislative fashion, in Hegel has been given
over to a transformative dynamic in which the concepts are flexible. This dynamic
process, however, culminates when Reason arrives as the final resolution, that historic
moment in which the object and knowledge of the object form a perfect unity. “Reason
is the certainty of being all reality”, Hegel writes, it “is the first positivity in which self-
consciousness is in its own self explicitly for itself, and ‘I’ is therefore only the pure
Herein lies Hegel’s concern. Kant’s subjectivism does not seem to be able to
account for historical transformation, for Spirit’s (Geist) great attainments through time.
In the context of an expanding European desire, it is clear that Hegel’s thought equates
the Kant’s subjectivism, Hegel asserts that “the liberation from the opposition of
consciousness ... lifts the determinations of thought above this timid, incomplete
standpoint and demands that they be considered not with any such limitation and
reference but as they are in their own proper character, as logic, as pure reason”.224 The
celebratory tone at work here signals that Hegel is concerned with the possibility of the
liberation of thought from the fetters of Kant’s caution concerning the limits of
knowledge. For Hegel, Kant had failed to overcome the vertigo that lies at the core of
the only basis for our cognitions; but it will not let them count as truths, but only as
cognitions of appearances.225
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As a consequence Kantian thought emerges as stagnant, and inadequate to detail, what
Hegel considered, the process of reason’s progress to great heights upon the global
stage.
expansion, and, therefore, for the discourse of the postcolonial, with its emphasis upon
conflict, liberation, is immediately apparent. Hegel takes Kant’s legislative accents and
transforms reason’s dynamism, via its conflicts, into a social force. Hegel’s theory of
the self is drawn up around one basic problematic. Proceeding from the assumption that
Absolute Spirit (unity) is greater than the individual self, it becomes the task of the self
to overcome the unknown darkness within, in order to be at one with the Absolute.
Whilst Kant argued that the Absolute perspective is impossible, and remained content to
locate reason’s dynamism in relation to reason’s dark side, for Hegel the absolute
light, from the obscure to the axiomatic, from slavery to mastery. For Heidegger it is a
conscious movement analogous to the possession and conquest of the land. “That
land”, he declares, “is the self-certainty of mental representations in respect of itself and
what it represents. To take complete possession of this land means to know the self-
reminds us, “a passage way” between “consciousness and reason, which, when
One of the most striking things about this passage from the individual to the
essentially painful and difficult. The self in Hegel’s economy is torn between its own
immediate experience and knowledge of the object and the possibility of subordinating
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that immediacy to a universal perspective, the Absolute. Yet as is characteristic of
Hegel’s thought, within this difficult division lies the possibility of movement and
change, the progress of Spirit. At the core of this painful conflict is the figure of desire.
For Fanon the struggle of desire, its toil in a sense, animates his intervention in the
black consciousness that seeks a unity through the idea of whiteness. I will turn to this
in due course.
established in and through the struggle of desire. Hegel writes, “this unity must become
as a structure of apperception, is the feeling that drives, animates, and structures the
struggle to overcome the divided self in order to establish an identity (‘true essence’).
The figure of the desiring ‘I’ is, as Alexandre Kojève insightfully puts it, “an emptiness,
greedy for content.”229 Desire in this context is thus a bodily metaphor. It is that
visceral aspect of being — hunger, thirst, sexuality — that initially enables the self to be
aware of self, that there is something present that is not the object outside. Selfhood in
Hegel begins with the sensations, the feeling body. This body will become crucial for
Fanon, and the discourse of the postcolonial. Hegel’s philosophy seeks to chart the
progress of Geist from a simple bodily experience of the object to the detached absolute
knowledge of the object. The process is one in which the body, its baseness in this
postcolonial thinker, Fanon seizes the body in order to disrupt Hegel’s philosophical
system. I would wish to contend that Fanon’s seizure of the body is an important
outward object. This manifestation he calls “Life”. He tells us, through “this reflection
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into itself the object has become Life”. Life is defined as “the pure movement of axial
rotation … the simple essence of Time which, … has the stable shape of Space.”230 The
desire for life is thus the desire to be filled with, to be satisfied in the fluxes and flows
that is being alive. To have Life is to actively dominate the objects of nature, in this
scheme. It is to find a bodily satisfaction in our acts upon objects. In other words,
desire is satisfied when the fluidity of the world’s objects are made to fit the form of
that desire. The action that desire produces negates the material world. “By negating
it”, as Kojève explains, “modifying it, [and] making it its own, the animal raises itself
It can be seen that the discourse of the sublime, the concern of this thesis,
inhabits Hegel. In Hegel the sublime emerges initially in that most basic aspect of the
living self, the biological drives. The Hegelian self at its core, if we can use such
sublimation. At the most basic level, what Kant called a natural disposition remains in
Hegel, in whom the self emerges in stages via the capacity for elevation above the
thing-in-itself, the slime and the mud of this world. But for Hegel the sublime is much
more fundamental than Kant would allow. If Kant isolated the possibility of sublimity,
as we found in chapter two, and opened it to a select few — Genius, the morally
purposeful, the educated, and the Cultured — Hegel effectively intensifies this elitism,
and puts it to work at the most basic level of being. In Hegel sublimity lies at the core
necessary to overcome the social implications of the Kantian sublime, in order to take
up what is much more fundamental to being, the bodily desire of Hegel. It is crucial to
note that Hegel is concerned with social formations, and this is why he proceeds to
theorise the social in terms of the problem of the bodily desire. In terms of the question
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Kantian subjectivism. Fanon’s intellectual context, as I will show, bears this assertion
out.
The individual desire, which is crucial for self-certainty, effects the problematic
that establishes the possibility of culture and society. Desire opens up possibility, but
seem to be able to distinguish the difference between people and objects. This desire is
necessity. If left to a life merely driven by this desire, and nothing else, Hobbes’
tamed. This taming is reason’s task. As such this boundless violent energy remains a
relation to reason, much like the failure of the imagination in Kant. Hegel’s reworking
of Kant takes the sublime in the same manner as Kant, as a violent yet natural force, and
puts it to work. Reason soars once again upon the wings of the sublime. The most
dramatic and crucial moment in establishing this lofty status takes place in a social
setting, in the encounter of desiring selves. For the desiring self in its pure sublime
form in encountering other desiring selves has a major problem to overcome. I will turn
to this in due course. For the moment, however, it will be necessary to take stock, before
Kant. Firstly, the sublime object in Hegel can be understood, in simple terms, as the
body, its seemingly boundless desire for the object. For Hegel the body in-itself is a
seething mass of violent desire. It is destructive; yet it opens up possibility. The body
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The sublime is a crucial component in this process. It is the despised darkness within
that establishes the necessity of reason, and marks its accomplishments. Thirdly, since
desire as the sublime object functions in Hegel in the service of reason, this presents the
discourse of the postcolonial with a complex problem. How useful are the conflictual
and transformative aspects of Hegel’s thought? With this in mind it will be useful to
introduce Fanon.
Fanon in France
In a recent foreword to Frantz Fanon’s path breaking Black Skin, White Masks
Homi Bhabha contends that “as Fanon attempts such audacious, often impossible,
transformations of truth and value, the jagged testimony of colonial dislocation, its
displacement of time and person, its defilement of culture and territory, refuses the
having located the fragmentary and unresolved tensions that characterise Fanon’s texts
— for Bhabha “the emergence of a truly radical thought … never dawns without casting
contends, “it is through image and fantasy — those orders that figure transgressively on
the borders of history and the unconscious — that Fanon most profoundly evokes the
colonial condition”.234 Whilst this insight into the productive difficulties of Fanon is
identification and desire over other critical moments, as Bhabha does, is to render those
other moments null and void. In fact Bhabha, in order to keep his reading of Fanon
‘pure’ in a sense, goes to great lengths to ward off the contaminating influences of
Fanon’s more humanistic moments. For Bhabha this humanism is simply discarded as a
the dark side of Man”.235 This desire for an uncontaminated Fanon obscures his
complex struggle with thinkers who have had a profound effect upon critical thought,
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such as Hegel. Despite rightly pointing out that Fanon ultimately refuses the “Hegelian
dream for a human reality in itself-for-itself”,236 Bhabha’s purity passes over the
contribution.
At the opposite end of the scale, Renate Zahar’s important Frantz Fanon:
Colonialism and Alienation approaches Fanon’s work from the standpoint of critical
Marxism. Zahar critically unpacks Fanon’s emphasis upon violent liberation in terms of
Marx’s concept of alienation. For Marx the inner intimacy that marks Idealism’s
dualistic self gives way in the modern world to a radically divided self. The self in
being denied the possibility of being at one with his or her work, “in the very act of
production” estranges “himself from himself”.237 Thus as Zahar weaves what turns out
upon the violent emancipation of the consciousness of the colonised actually falls short
of the Marxist mark. For Zahar it turns out that Fanon, if he is anything at all, is far too
Hegelian in his insistence upon the transformative powers of violence. Zahar thus
anxiously suggests that Fanon’s Hegelian fervour be toned down: “violence as such
merely furnishes the basis for achieving emancipation; emancipation itself can only be
lament: Fanon fails as a Marxist. This reading of Fanon is thus marked by its complete
I would contend that Fanon’s contribution to critical thought can be found in his
disturbing insistence upon the juxtaposition of the psychoanalytic and the ontological,
and in his refusal to remain committed to a sense of finality in terms of the latter.
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the fifties, and experiencing life as a black man in postwar France, Fanon used and
abused (in the active sense) all of the available critical tools in order to establish the
possibility for the radical liberation of the oppressed. In terms of the ontological
moments in Fanon’s oeuvre, which are my concern here, it is crucial to note that Fanon
wrote in an intellectual climate that was essentially preoccupied with Hegel. Michael
Kelly’s useful study, Hegel in France, underscores this preoccupation. Hegel’s impact
“caught the attention and imagination of the postwar Parisian intelligentsia and the
international intellectual community after it.”239 In the decade after the second world
war, in which Fanon’s Peau Noire, Masques Blancs appeared (1952), publications
dedicated directly to Hegel by far outweigh the number of publications from the
previous forty four years.240 Fanon wrote in an intellectual context that was grappling
with the possibility of a liberated self, and at the same time France’s own colonialist
chauvinism in Algeria.241
This (French) search for self-liberation is nowhere more apparent than in the
work of the influential Russian emigrè Alexandre Kojève.242 Kojève’s work can be
in France in Fanon’s day (and upon current critical trends) cannot be understated. As
Shadia Drury’s insightful The Roots of Postmodern Politics argues, Kojève’s reading of
Hegel — with its influence upon the contemporary French criticism of Foucault
(“Folie”), Queneau (“Heroics”), and Bataille (“Revolt”), and the American criticism of
Leo Strauss, Allen Bloom, and Francis Fukuyma — is crucial in the development of
what she calls postmodern irrationalism. In indicting the violence that marks this
concerning the supremacy of Reason over human affairs, that postmodern thinking
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begins to emerge. In order to overcome the rationalist instrumentality at the core of
Reason, and as a consequence the estrangement of social being, Kojève sought modes
of thinking and being that would disrupt Reason’s supremacy. As such, Kojève’s
experiential excess, the scandalous aspects of the self that occupy the edges of thought
that Reason banishes: passion, instinct, disorder, madness, etc. Kojève’s romanticism
thus effects a thinking that is preoccupied with what Reason has banished. And it is this
preoccupation, for Drury, underpinned by the notion that Reason disarms the fluid,
Fanon takes up Kojèvean modes of thought and reveals that the privileging of
class as the basis for social analysis, as Kojève does, remains difficult for the discourse
of the postcolonial. Kojève brackets Hegel’s master and slave, since, according to his
thought, this relationship embodies what is at stake in human existence. For Kojève the
the way the self thinks and acts in the social world. This structure is inescapable. The
self is established in and through the interplay of this dialectic of domination at every
commanding moment in Hegel, and romantically celebrated slavery as the most apt site
from which to transform a reason governed world. He argued that Hegel’s slave is
contains the means to break free from reason’s authority, to transform the social world.
and romantic in its assumptions. Hegel’s bracketed slave exceeds, for Kojève, Hegel’s
progress”, the slave who “did not want to be a Slave. … is ready for change”, since “in
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becoming at his origin, in his essence, in his very existence”.243 Kojève’s celebration of
slavery is driven by a vision for a dynamic self that is based upon an unleashed bodily
desire, the sublime core of the self. The slave’s power occurs in that moment in which
the sublime is able to be unleashed in order to disrupt reason, and to affirm the value of
Life. The possibility of the sublime essentially separates the master and the slave. The
slave unlike the master is able to seize the sublime as disruptive since it is reason’s task
to tame its violence. Herein lies Kojève’s important contribution to French thought. In
the Slave has every reason to cease to be a Slave. … the experience of the fight
that made him a Slave predisposes him to that act of self-overcoming, of negation
As in all discussions concerning the sublime, the feeling of terror in the face of a
great power that threatens the self’s existence, or the self’s reasonable faculties, is
central. Whilst Kant and his British precursors established a theory of the sublime in
terms of the opposition of the subjective and the natural, nature being the source of
terror, Kojève implies that the sublime is essentially a class based question. Masters are
the source of the terror. The task of the subjected self is, in face of this social terror, to
overcome, to transcend the limits that such terror imposes within. The remarkable thing
concerning Hegel’s theorisation of the master and slave relationship is that it at once
rejects Kant’s musing’s concerning sublime mastery, the subject of chapter two of the
thesis, and legitimates the struggle of the oppressed. The space of the slave emerges as
the most apt site from which to transform the world. Clearly the Kojèvean sublime
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Kojève’s formulations find their way into Fanon’s texts. In Peau Noire,
Masques Blancs, for instance, Fanon writes, “The black is a black man; that is, as a
which he must be extricated. The problem is important. I propose nothing short of the
liberation of the man of color from himself”.245 L’An Cinq de la Rèvolution Algérienne
likewise proposes the radical restructuring of the self in terms distinctly Kojèvean.
with cultural tradition that radically restructures social being. “This trial of strength”,
he writes, “remodels the consciousness that man has of himself”. Since the revolution
began, Algeria “is no longer the product of hazy and fantasy-ridden imaginations. …
There is a new kind of Algerian man, a new dimension to his existence”.246 Similarly in
Les dammés de la terre, which outlines powerfully the economic and psychological
discomposure of the oppressed,247 and finds in the violent fight for freedom the
Decolonization is the veritable creation of new men. But this creation owes
nothing of its legitimacy to any supernatural power; the ‘thing’ which has been
colonized becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself. … The
realizes his humanity that he begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will
The subtext of Kojève becomes immediately apparent. But I would contend that
this subtext, and its (misdirected) Hegelian fervour, remains far from settled in Fanon.
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Kojève loom large, ultimately refused to bracket the master and slave off from Hegel’s
whole system. This means that Fanon seems to be ambivalent toward Hegel. Whilst a
cannot be reduced to the issue of class alone. As chapter one revealed, the discourse of
nationalism, to name a few ! and a disparate host of theories and ideas to deal with
colonialism and its effects upon the contemporary world. Indeed the doubleness that I
suggested attends to the term ‘postcolonial’ in chapter one, with its unsettled
architecture, its gaps and irreducible conflicts, reveals the resistance to systemisation
that marks Fanon’s work. Such a resistance, I would contend, leads us directly to the
toward Hegel is a crucial moment. It will be useful, therefore, at this point to turn
directly to Hegel’s theorisation of the master and the slave relationship, before making
our way to Fanon’s productive engagement in it. My aim, as in the case of Kant, will be
to inhabit the edges of Hegel’s architectonic system. I thus resist the temptation, unlike
Kojève, to bracket the master and the slave relationship, to disconnect its function from
that Fanon is primarily concerned with the sublime desire of Hegel. Rather than the
class based Kojèvean sublime, and its revolutionary implications, in the ambivalence of
Fanon the sublime emerges through the figure of the desiring body, the terror within
that consciousness must overcome. The master and the slave are set forth in Hegel in
order to open up the possibility of transforming pure desire, its conflict, in order to
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Hegel’s Master and Slave
My reading of Hegel is directed toward tracing the use of the sublime through
the figure of the slave. As in the more formal consideration of the sublime in
Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, I would contend that the sublime is most persuasively
played out in Hegel through the figure of the slave, as it appears in The Phenomenology
analogy between the order of the human and the divine that puts into play the
fundamental aims of the Hegelian system, de Man connects the sublime to the figure of
the slave. Drawing upon Hegel’s reading of Aesop, the “misshapen humpbacked
slave”, Hegel writes, in which “prose begins”,250 de Man contends that “Hegel’s
Crucially for de Man the result, of what appears upon the surface to be a performative
oversight on the part of Hegel, is that the work becomes “politically legitimate and
effective as the undoer of usurped authority. The enslaved place and condition of the
section on the sublime in the Aesthetics, and the enslaved place of the Aesthetics within
the corpus of Hegel’s complete works, are the symptoms of their strength”.251 I would
For the thesis the discourse of the slave is crucial. Through my engagement
with Kant I have opened up the notion that the sublime is essentially a conservative
trope. Its noble formulation belongs to what can be described as an elite basis for
Culture, civility, and the myth of the nation. Hegel’s intervention relocates the sublime,
and gives its work over to the oppressed, the slavish underling. The liberatory
implications that lay at the core of this relocation become immediately apparent. But I
would wish to suggest that we need to be wary of the liberatory possibilities that Hegel
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conservative. What he opens up is the basis for the conservative myth of progress. The
postcolonial sublime thus hinges upon the conservatism that lies at the core of the
Hegelian slave. As I will show, Fanon’s difficulty in taking up the Hegelian slave as a
model for (post)colonial oppression suggests that he has a different understanding of the
sublime in mind, or at least, if we are to take the postcolonial sublime in the context of
Fanon’s thought, the conservative sublime must be disrupted. Fanon’s work wrests the
sublime from its conservative trajectory and puts it to a more disruptive use. This thesis
I will turn now to that famous section in the Phenomenology of Spirit to draw
out Hegel’s conservatism. The theorisation of the master and slave relationship can be
between Being (sensory knowledge) and Being-for-self (reason). Reason is able to take
flight upon the wings of the master and slave. In the shifting relationship between
consciousness and the object, Hegel’s concern, the master and slave mark the transition
from a simple knowledge of the object of sense to reason’s reign over the objects of
sense. If in Kant the judgement performed a bridging task, in Hegel the master and the
slave serve such a purpose. I would contend that it is no less an aesthetic moment.
The theorisation of the master and the slave begins when the desiring self meets
another self. The desiring self, as I have shown, with its boundless appetite finds an
awareness of self in the consumption of objects (Being). But as soon as this has taken
place a problem arises. The act of consumption, in whatever form, does exactly what it
sets out to do, it consumes the object. As banal as it sounds, if desire is the basis for
self-hood the consumed object no longer exists, and the self no longer has the means for
locating self-certainty. For Hegel this means that the only way that the self can
resists being consumed. For self-certainty to be possible the object that resists must be
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able to assert a desire comparable to the consuming self. The only object that is capable
of such an assertion is another self. As such Hegel breaks through that radical
subjectivism and relativism that marked Kant, and situates reason’s dynamic processes
in a social context. Through Hegel reason thus enters the social domain.
bodily satisfaction that emerges in overcoming the object) the meeting of two selves
produces a problem. Both selves seek from the other the necessary fulfilment that a
violent desire demands. In Hobbesian terms, as a consequence of this violent desire the
encounter between selves is essentially conflictual. Hegel then asks: how is social order
negate the object. The possibility of the social emerges only when this being-for-itself
terms set forth by Jean Hyppolite’s existential reading of Hegel, this is a transformation
that frees the subject “from the only slavery possible, enslavement to life.”252 The
passage from the individual to the universal can be understood in terms of the
eighteenth-century preoccupation with the sublime, as the demand for overcoming the
natural, the bodily, the biological in the name of a greater power, a greater self. Of
course that greater self is a reasonable one. For it is Reason that emerges in that
moment in which the self overcomes the mundane consumption of objects, overcomes
bodily desire.
The most undeniable and compelling test of this moment comes in the face of
death, the possibility of the complete annihilation of the body. The willingness to face
death, to risk losing the capacity to desire, shows that there is a being, a human essence,
a will, that exists above and beyond material desire. It is the sublime moment par
excellence: the self must overcome his or her inner fears in the face of that great and
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unknown power, death. Interesting and disturbing is Hegel’s passing over of Kant’s
subjective use of the sublime, his insistence that it is this sublimity that informs and
structures the social. The relationship between people, desiring selves, is at its base, for
Hegel, a battle to overcome the fear of that ultimate marker of the sublime, the greatest
of threats, death.
The willingness to risk life, the object of desire, in this way opens up the
it is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won; only thus is it proved that
for self-consciousness, its essential being is not [just] being, not the immediate
form in which it appears, nor in its submergence in the expanse of life, but rather
moment, that it is only pure being-for-self. The individual who has not risked his
life may well be recognized as a person, but he has not attained to the truth of this
But this sublime moment takes an interesting turn. For the possibilities of desire
do not leave us without problems. It seems that desire cannot be done away with that
easily, and the problem that we encountered through the consumption of objects
emerges again. The survivor of the battle to the death is left with no basis upon which
to establish a sense of self, in the same way that the consumption of objects leaves the
self with nothing to satisfy desire for life. Combat to the death destroys the condition of
reciprocity, of mutual recognition, which has been set forth as the necessary condition
for self-certainty. The only way that this can be resolved is for the combatants to
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survive the battle. This means that there is someone left to recognise the self, despite
the fact that the basis for this relationship is a conflictual and violent one initially.
There are winners and losers in battle. Thus two paths to the absolute emerge.
Here we find the master and the slave. In this equation the master is the one who is able
to risk life, and thus establish an independent consciousness. The slave, on the other
hand, is unwilling to risk life, and is bound by both the material condition of Life
(desire), and the master, who has seemingly transcended this condition.
In their outworking the master and the slave thus face very different kinds of
problems. The master, who is the proven subject, rules by means of this transcendent
state. In other words the master is in the position of certainty, surety, and therefore able
to reasonably rule. The slave is the object of this rule, and thus, according to the
necessity of mutual recognition as the basis for self-certainty, the master gets
recognition from the slave as the slave obeys. But at this point the Phenomenology
makes an interesting turn. After having valorised the capacity of mastery to overcome
desire, Hegel rejects mastery as a legitimate basis for reason. The master, who seemed
to overcome the sublime and thus earned the right to rule, ultimately does not get
satisfaction, or in other words, an adequate return in the recognition stakes from the
slave because inequality prevents it. The obedience of the slave does not provide
adequate recognition for the master, who thus emerges as the figure of the unfulfilled
ruler, an extreme embodiment of the cliche, ‘it’s lonely at the top’. The master faces the
problem that we have encountered in several different forms previously. That is, if
there is no return from the other then the self loses the basis for self’s existence.
Mastery thus becomes, as Kojève puts it, “an existential impasse.”254 The master in
winning the right to rule paradoxically embarks upon the road to no where, as far as
self-consciousness is concerned. The slave, however, embodies that sense of the self
upon which Reason is able to assert its authority. This is something that Nietzsche
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would later invert, rejecting ‘slave morality’ in favour of ‘master morality’, in order to
set forth ‘the will to power’ as the marker of authentic human experience. For Hegel,
however, it is the slave, the one unwilling to risk life, who is finally able to overcome
desire and transform the condition of inequality that was effected by the fear of death.
The slave opens up the possibility for an autonomous sense of self, and thus establishes
a path to a free self-consciousness. In producing goods for the master, which are
consumed only by the master, the slave is able to project him or herself onto a concrete
other. This means that the fear of death and the constraints that come with it are
overcome, albeit through (an)other path. In short, and this is a matter that would
become crucial for Marx, the slave discovers him or herself through work. Hegel
writes, through “service he rids himself of his attachment to natural existence in every
single detail; and gets rid of it by working on it.” This means that the slave is able to
become “conscious of what he truly is.” For “consciousness, qua worker, comes to see
The master in the equation thus functions not as the site for progress, but merely
as the means for effecting a condition of injustice that would produce the necessity of
the slave working upon the object in order to overcome desire. The slave whilst
preoccupation with Genius, that revered Archimedean point outside and in excess of the
social, and occupied by a select few, is overturned by a gritty sublimity that inhabits,
and seeks to transform, the social world. It takes work to overcome the sublime, work
upon what initially appeared a harsh and hostile environment. This necessity marks the
legitimacy established in that age old notion: that it is from conditions of adversity that
the triumph of the human Spirit rises, from which this chapter begins. It is the slave
who must find an explanation for the unequal conditions of life. It is the slave who
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appears to be in touch with the reality of being, and as such emerges as the voice of
legitimacy, the marker of authentic being. Such a task, despite Kojève’s Marxism, lies
at the core of conservative traditions, which are built upon the triumph of Spirit,
the master and slave relationship are nowhere more apparent than in Hegel’s Berlin
The servant ... works off the singularity and egoism of his will in the service of
the master, sublates the inner immediacy of desire, and in this privation and fear
universal self-consciousness.256
Thus far I have argued that rather than a problem of consciousness, as in Kant,
the Hegelian sublime draws upon an image of the body, its boundless desire for the
object. This body takes on the character of the sublime object in Hegel. I have also
drawn a distinction between the Kojèvean sublime, its revolutionary implications, and
the Hegelian sublime, which renders the master and slave relation as less revolutionary
than conservative. In insisting upon valorising the great labour of reason, the master
and slave are utilised to underscore the legitimacy of reason’s just authority. I would
suggest that Fanon’s work can be located in this gap between the sublime as a
revolutionary force, and the sublime as the basis for conservative myths of progress.
Such a division marks recent theory, as we shall see when I turn to consider the work of
Lyotard in the following chapter. I would suggest that Fanon is fully cognisant of this
division. It lies at the core of his ambivalence toward the thought of Hegel. In the
context of this thesis, Fanon’s engagement in Hegel can be read as a powerful statement
concerning what is at stake in the discourse of the postcolonial. With Western reason in
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its critical sites, what assumptions concerning the self will enable the target to be hit
with precision? It will be useful to turn, at this point, to Fanon for a tentative response.
It is in the final moments of Peau Noire, Masques Blancs that we find Fanon
dealing directly with Hegel. The work, as Fanon explains, in examining “the black-
white relation” seeks to open up the possibility for “the liberation of the man of color
from himself”. Working from the basic premises (‘facts’ as Fanon puts it) that “White
men consider themselves superior to black men” and “Black men want to prove to white
men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect”, Peau
Noire, Masques Blancs with its interruptions and conflicts radically disrupts the painful
consequence of colonialism: “For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is
white”.257
The section entitled “The Negro and Hegel”, which is a subset of the chapter
entitled “The Negro and Recognition”, emerges as the final moment in this critical
examination of the black-white relation. Here Fanon wears a philosophical hat.258 The
Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it also exists
The possibility of this moment — “human worth and reality” are constituted through,
and only through, “that other being”260 — in keeping with Hegel’s emphasis upon the
social nature of being, arises in and through the conflict of desire and the necessity of
maintaining the object of desire. This is Hegel’s great contribution to critical theory,
and it is this contribution that marks Fanon’s lament concerning the plight of black
consciousness in France. For Fanon it is precisely the lack of conflict, the short
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circuiting of the possibility of struggle, that has issued the fatal blow upon black
significant that Fanon draws the struggle of desire, against which reason’s great labour
is staged, into a discussion concerning the master and slave relationship. He argues:
Historically, the Negro steeped in the inessentiality of servitude was set free by
Out of slavery the Negro burst into the lists where his masters stood. Like those
servants who are allowed once every year to dance in the drawing room, the
Negro is looking for a prop. The Negro has not become a master. When there are
The Negro is a slave who has been allowed to assume the attitude of a master.
The white man is a master who has allowed his slaves to eat at his table.261
break, for Fanon hasn’t actually arrived. Whilst in that moment in which, as Eric
Hobsbawm contends, faced with the decline in the possibility of a masterful sublimity
“the old colonial powers were patently too weak, even after a victorious war, to restore
their old positions”262 (as I discussed in chapter one), Europe gradually relaxed its
colonial status and granted what could loosely be called a political freedom to its
colonies. The granting of this emancipation, however, at least in Fanon’s context (the
situation is different for the black struggle in the USA), was set forth as an act of
mastery. Rather than a toppled empire, besieged, unable to ward off the resistance of its
subjects (this is not to say that there was no resistance), and finally overcome, the
empire hasn’t actually ceased playing the game of mastery, it has merely changed the
rules of the game. As such, for Fanon, the emancipation of the colonised peoples, set
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forth in the guise of simply abolishing the master/slave dialectic, merely writes them out
colonialism. In having their status as slaves removed there is now no longer a position
from which the formerly colonised is able to legitimately speak, since such a category
from the perspective of the former empire no longer exists. For the colonised it is as if
being granted a freedom that effectively erased a history of colonial injustice, colonised
peoples lost the basis for carving out an independent sense of identity. As Fanon tells
us, the “upheaval did not make a difference in the Negro. He went from one way of life
Upon the surface it appears as if Fanon attempts to deal with this problem in
questions concerning freedom and independent being. He points out that the formerly
selfhood upon that conflictual terrain of human desire that preoccupied Hegel, and
Kojève after him. Despite what appears upon the surface to be freedom from slavery,
there is a sense in which the former slave still desires to speak as a slave in a dialectic of
domination. Hegel’s presence in Fanon thus marks at its most basic level the problem
of finding a legitimate space from which to speak. Fanon’s world is marked in its
incapacity to clearly define, to categorise, and to label social spaces. He thus poses a
crucial question: is the impossibility of the clearly defined an empowering moment for
the oppressed?
It is in this sense that the pervasiveness of Hegel’s theorisation of the master and
slave relationship can’t be ignored as a critical lapse (Bhabha). The slave metaphor
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position from which to speak. Thus the figure of the slave turns up in these terms in
Julie Dowling’s painting. Her scandalous Julie Clampett seizes the figure of the slave
as a legitimate space from which to claim some kind of social justice. In text at the
Such a claim signals that colonial imposition has erased its injustices by erasing the
figure of the aboriginal as slave from its history. Thus to claim such a figure is to
confront the colonial West with what it has produced yet denies, its violent
exploitations.
What Dowling rightly recognises is that the issue of slavery has been a moot
point in the outworking of Enlightenment thought. Indeed the British parliament prided
slavery and the slave-trade. The slave issue provoked a brutal civil war in America, and
produced a racist apologetics that would never be realised in Britain. D.W. Griffith’s
influential film, The Birth of a Nation: or The Clansmen (1919), is a case in point.
Britain’s active involvement in anti-slavery campaigns served as a measure for its own
‘civility’. To evoke the figure of the slave, as Dowling does, is thus to evoke this ‘civil’
conscience, one that would work its way into European thought generally.266 The 1837
— slavery and the slave-trade; but for these she has made some atonement, for the
latter, by abandoning the traffic; for the former, by the sacrifice of 20 millions of
money.267
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In order to make a claim for justice in the Australian context, Dowling’s utilisation of
the slave metaphor emerges as particularly pointed because the issue of slavery in the
‘other’ cultures that had not attained the civility of the British. To suggest that the
the edges of Julie Clampett we can hear the brutal disparities of civility: “this state was
founded by Invaders, not Settlers! And ... to this very day Aboriginal people still cry
It will be useful to turn back to Hegel to explore the structure of this political
empowerment. It is in this grapple with Hegel that Fanon’s postcolonial politics begins
disturbingly excludes the African from world history, that the problematic of the slave is
initially set forth. In Hegel’s expulsion of the African from world history, he announces
the hope that is opened up as a consequence of the slave trade. I will quote three
sections from The Philosophy of History that appear in the introduction in order to
Negroes are enslaved by Europeans and sold to America. Bad as this may be,
their lot in their land is even worse, since there a slavery quite as absolute exists;
for it is the essential principle of slavery, that man has not yet attained a
Through the pervading influence of slavery all those bonds of moral regard which
we cherish towards each other disappear, and it does not occur to the Negro mind
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The only essential connection that has existed and continued between the Negroes
and the Europeans is that of slavery. In this the Negroes see nothing unbecoming
them, and the English who have done most for abolishing the slave-trade and
have been the occasion of the increase of human feeling among the Negroes.
[Slavery] is itself a phase of advance from the merely isolated sensual existence
with it. Slavery is in and for itself injustice, for the essence of humanity is
Freedom; but for this man must be matured. The gradual abolition of slavery is
Obviously the notion that slavery, from the perspective of that well worn and still
widely accepted European cliche, ‘did the natives a favour’, is profoundly racist. Yet
there is a sense, as Fanon in his complex engagement in Hegel reveals, that cogent
possibilities are opened up in that moment that this metaphor is reinscribed into a post-
colonial politics. The metaphor of the slave thus becomes a position from which to
speak, and its difficult and disturbing location in Hegel’s thought demands the
questions: what kind of speaking position would this be? what kind of legitimacy does it
The hope for the African that is set forth by Hegel reveals the importance of the
master and slave relationship, not only in the context of Hegel’s ‘world history’ but also
in the political strategies of the discourse of the postcolonial. In the first instance we
find the notion that a consciousness of freedom arrives only in and through the
condition of oppression. Slavery for Hegel opens up the possibility for movement,
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able to deliver the self from a slave like consciousness, that is a slave to life, to embrace
the possibility of the Absolute. There is thus the romantic sense that it is in the
prevails. It’s a simple case of the self not knowing what freedom is until freedom has
ben won in the face of unfreedom. The idea that freedom is something to be attained,
worked for, underpins this notion. The possibility of the Absolute is opened up only in
the labour of the self in overcoming the desire for Life, in a process of sublimation.
It would seem that this slave sublime has much to offer the discourse of the
postcolonial. But at the very moment in which readers await the climax of a text
dedicated to destroying oppression and outlining the key to black consciousness and
political struggle (the triumph of the human spirit awaits!), something quite remarkable
happens. The reader turns the page upon which Hegelian defiance has begun to carve
out a solid base from which to rise, and finds Hegel banished to the margins of the text.
Whilst Hegel holds out a great hope, seized by Kojève, the possibility of the sublime
moment for the slave, in which the condition of slavery is transformed, the master/slave
dialectic exceeded, has not had the chance to arrive. I quote the note in full:
I hope I have shown that here the master differs basically from the master
described be Hegel. For Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the
consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but
work.
In the same way, the slave here is in no way identifiable with the slave who loses
himself in the object and finds in his work the source of his liberation.
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In Hegel the slave turns away from the master and turns toward the object.
Here the slave turns toward the master and abandons the object.269
asserted it seems only to be crossed out. Fanon’s relationship to Hegel’s thought can
thus only be considered as a kind of strange paradox. It was Hegel who in setting the
scene for his grand outline of the history of the world, The Philosophy of History, found
it necessary to include Africa only in order to reveal its exclusion from the main body of
the work: ‘world history’. Africa, Hegel tells us, “is no historical part of the World; it
this blatant exclusion is justified simply because the “Negro … has not yet attained to
the realization of any substantial objective existence”. This means that for Hegel the
violence upon the African. Where once the African was hastily passed over, gotten-out-
the appearance of scholarly thoroughness, Hegel now emerges in the text not to receive
accolades, but instead to be critically located in a manner that defies the very fabric of
his philosophical system. The complexity of the text’s (ab)use of Hegel signals that
Fanon understood too well the difficulty of his own critical speaking position in relation
inhabited by exactly the problem that his work seeks to abolish: the problem of
both master of one’s destiny and yet at the same time a slave to European philosophical
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gesture toward the possibility of a future free from the dominating dialectic that is at the
Thus, in having crossed out Hegel, remarkably Fanon leaves him behind and
turns to thought that seeks to exceed the conservative limits that the master/slave
dialectic imposes. In quick, perplexing succession Fanon evokes the work of Mounier,
Fichte, and Nietzsche, in order to set forth the possibility of a being beyond the
reformer of the forties and fifties, he writes: “The young Negroes whom he knew” in
Africa “sought to maintain their alterity”(my emphasis) .271 Fichte emerges as a thinker
who sets forth the notion that the “self takes place by opposing itself … Yes and no”.
Fichte’s post-Kantian contention was that the thing-in-itself exists only in thought, in
the I am I. To act is thus synonymous with the production of an I. The I is, effectively,
the spectator of the self acting in the world of objects. As such Fichte finds an absolute
space from which to construct a world, with the absolute power to do everything, to
Clearly Fanon’s violent textual manoeuvres betray a desire for the possibility of
a being beyond structures of dependence, a being that acts rather than reacts. The
discourse of the postcolonial, as Fanon would have it, is marked by the difficulty of
taking up a dialectical location from which to ‘fight’ for freedom. Herein lies the basis
for the postcolonial sublime. Fanon’s resistance to the conservative aims of the
Hegelian dialectic, and search for modes of thought that exceed the terms of dialectics,
signals what lies at the core of the postcolonial sublime. As a consequence of the
process of decolonisation, a dialectical basis for politics is no longer tenable from the
social and cultural politics, the postcolonial, as an ambiguous entity, demands that a
new politics of resistance to such a teleology must be found. The postcolonial sublime
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represents such politics. Its excess defies the possibility of bringing unity to bear upon
With the difficulty of dialectics in mind, it will be useful to follow Fanon and
turn to the thought of Nietzsche, who I would wish take up in some detail. Fanon
declares, “Man’s behaviour is not only reactional. And there is always resentment in a
reaction. Nietzsche had already pointed that out in The Will to Power”.273 It will be
useful to dwell upon Nietzsche, in order to draw out the implications of action, as
opposed to reaction, in the context of our consideration of the master and slave
relationship. It is in Nietzsche that the possibilities of moving through and beyond the
master and slave dialectic are opened up. Does Fanon utilise Nietzsche fully?
the figure of the wandering (wanderung) self. It is this self who discovers and presents
a genealogy of human morality, and a theory of the master and the slave relationship.
This is a self who has been uncluttered by the demands of a stagnant time and place, a
self who is free to seek an enlightenment, and thus able to speak with authority as one
that is ‘world wise’, and in touch with the true excesses of the over-abundant nature of
life. Nietzsche’s wanderer evokes the romantic trope of the holy traveller — Buddha,
Paul the Apostle — or perhaps even the prototype Hollywood Western hero. The
wanderer dispels the myth of the ‘tried-and-true’ perspective, in the name of a creative
intervention that speaks from the uncertain and excessive flux of phenomenological
experience. In the context of Idealism, Nietzsche’s thought seeks to establish a basis for
knowledge upon what Idealism rejects, the body. If for Hegel the body with its sublime
desire demands to be tamed, for Nietzsche it is precisely this body that opens up the
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Given this insistence upon the sublime body, it is compelling that Nietzsche
produces a theory of the master and the slave. He sets his master and slave forth, like
Marx (though I suspect that Nietzsche never read Marx), via a class based theory of
morality. He declares, “I finally discovered” that there are “two basic types” of human
morality, “and one basic difference. There are master morality and slave morality”.274
Upon the surface it appears that the social conditions of life precede and determine
human thinking and action. Moral categories such as good and bad seem to appear as
epiphenomenon, they merely reflect class structure. This means that “good and bad ...
[are] for a long time the same thing as noble and base, master and slave”.275 Morality is
designations were everywhere first applied to human beings and only later, derivatively,
radically disrupted.
Instead of the slave, Nietzsche champions the noble master. From a position of
privilege and power, the master proudly sets forth a morality based upon the autonomy
that such a material position enables. Despising the underclass, the master’s strength
lies in the power of autonomy, in other words, in the power to decide for self above all
other selves in a manner that does not depend upon existing moral categories. The
master has the power to declare this knowing in a transcendent artfulness, and possesses
Interestingly the underclass, from the perspective of the noble, are considered as
“the doglike people who allow themselves to be maltreated”. These are “the begging
flatterers, [who are] above all the liars”278since they hold to the illusion of the
consciousness, which is formed in those who are not willing to face death. But rather
than the transformative power that Hegel finds in this moment, Nietzsche argues that
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slave-consciousness produces the kind of nihilistic morality that his work seeks to
obliterate.
slavish existence, sets forth a pessimistic, sceptical and suspicious morality that
attempts to relieve the pressure inflicted as a consequence of the need to survive. The
slave thus produces a morality of utility which bears more than a casual resemblance to
Christ’s teachings. The slave produces a morality “to ease existence for those who
suffer: here pity, the complaisant and obliging hand, the warm heart, patience, industry,
humility, and friendliness are honoured — for here these are the most useful qualities
and almost the only means for enduring the pressure of existence”.279
For Nietzsche the problem with slave morality is that it is an existence that is
constantly preoccupied with the idea of freedom. This preoccupation thus signals that
there is no real freedom in a slavish existence, because ultimately the artful existence
that Nietzsche demands is negated. The slave must necessarily project an idea of
freedom in order to cope with the stress that the condition of slavery brings. Like Marx,
Nietzsche thus argues that real freedom can only be found in the moment in which
freedom itself is not an issue, in other words, in the moment in which freedom is an
always already condition. But unlike Marx, Nietzsche never considered just how the
with Nietzschean thought, one that is crucial in the discourse of the postcolonial, which
struggle.280
But given this emphasis upon the artful and nomadic nature of being in
Nietzsche, the problem of how to think through the observations of the wanderer in this
instance becomes crucial, rather than the issue of social transformation. Like Fanon’s
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such a speaking position. Can these observations be read as objective propositions
former, then Nietzsche’s claim to truth here works against the diseased nature of
language,281 and the wanderer’s desire to escape nihilism. If the latter, and I suspect
that this is the case, what becomes important is not so much the content of the
observation, but the authority, or the authenticity of the judge in this artful intervention.
A close inspection of the text reveals an anxiousness concerning a reading which would
make this inattention to the possibility of social transformation, and celebration of the
master as the basis for a rational defence of social inequality. Nietzsche writes:
There are master morality and slave morality — I add immediately that in all the
higher and mixed cultures there also appear attempts at mediation between these
two moralities, and yet more often the interpenetration and mutual
misunderstanding of both, and at times they occur directly alongside each other —
Thus an anxiousness emerges concerning the finality of this observation. In the context
general. The too many variations to be captured in a single statement, the excesses that
cannot be contained, thwart any demand for the systematic. The excessive nature of the
material world renders the wanderer’s discovery as an artful intervention, rather than a
propositional truth, and means that its ‘solutions’ do not belong to the processes of
reason’s logic. The wanderer, in touch with the unpresentable magnitude of experience,
presents an idea which is linked to the messy and muddy world of the everyday,
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precisely the world that the discourse of the sublime seeks to transcend. Any
valorise the speaking position of the wanderer. Thus Nietzsche opens up the possibility
speaks, but from the messy space of uncertainty. The object emerges as an opaque
construction. The morality set forth moves beyond the empiricism that Marx demands,
creativity, and artfulness that the text champions. The text presents a double movement,
it simultaneously sets forth a theory of morality, and at the same time collapses the
distinction between the wanderer as narrator and the valorisation of the master’s
autonomy. The upshot is a textual effect which valorises the creative judgement of the
wanderer, whose unbelongingness allows the possibility of escape from the nihilism
masterful self, the artful moment beyond good and evil. This intervention as a creative
act is synonymous therefore with the pure force of the will, or, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘the
will to power’, that Fanon champions as an actional, rather than reactional subject
position. The will to power is a radically realist, perhaps ‘hyper-real’, take upon life. It
space of the sublime, to draw the sublime in its most excessive form, in this case the
plethora, the experiential excess that comprises thought and being, into the fort/da of
Idealism. Nietzsche writes, “the world is the will to power — and nothing besides!
And you yourselves are also this will to power — and nothing besides!”283
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The will to power radically disrupts any sense of an essential subject behind the
or force, that effects the division of self and other, and of subject and object. The will to
power emerges as the plurality, the excess, of forces upon which identity is arbitrarily,
and artfully constructed. Values and morals are thus built upon the excessive field of
contradictory forces that Nietzsche calls the will to power, and must be affirmed, rather
than discovered ‘in themselves’ as belief in transcendent systems presupposes. The will
to power has no origin or purpose, and no beginning and end. Reality for Nietzsche
consists of selves caught, though not to their detriment, in a world without teleology,
endlessly moving and mobile, a world in the flux of constant and indeterminate
transformation. This indeterminate condition sets forth the possibility for “the
enjoyment of all kinds of uncertainty”, and opens the door for an “experimentalism, as a
counterweight to ... [the] extreme fatalism” that the suppression of God’s eulogy effects.
The indeterminate calls forth the “abolition of the concept of necessity ... [and the]
abolition of the ‘will’” as the ground for understanding and action. It also calls forth the
Hegel’s celebration of the possibilities that slavery opens up. Given this, it is rather
ultimately Fanon’s crossing out of Hegel amounts to nothing less than a complete turn
to Nietzschean modes of thought. But this implies a total break from Hegel, a break that
Black Skin, White Masks, and indeed Fanon’s work generally, in its valorisation of the
153
Nietzsche appears. We find him at the end of that rapid movement through Mounier to
Fichte, that resists, in its sheer pace the notion that everything culminates in Nietzsche.
I would contend that Fanon’s foray into matters autonomous, perhaps with a
future vision in mind, hardly constitutes a complete turn away from Hegel. For even
though Hegel has been crossed out (too late!) there is a sense in which his haunting
presence remains. If Fanon’s gesture toward Nietzsche radically rejects the possibilities
of the romantic slavery of Kojève, the valorisation of mastery void of any consideration
theorisation of the slave opens up, since it deals with the question of emancipation that
Nietzsche’s thought fails to deal with, and the possibility of a future free from structures
of dependence, as Nietzsche attempts to open up. Rather than rigid critical positions,
Hegel and Nietzsche present temporal extremes that ultimately remain illusive. As
Fanon declares:
The architecture of this work [Black Skins, White Masks] is rooted in the temporal.
… Ideally, the present will always contribute to the building of the future. And
this future is not the future of the cosmos but rather the future of my century, my
will come later. I belong irreducibly to my time. And it is for my time that I
should live. The future should be an edifice supported by living men. This
structure is connected to the present to the extent that I consider the present in
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It is in this space, that moment caught between the present and the possibility of the
future that Fanon’s work emerges. In the context of Hegel’s thought, with its
preoccupation with the idea of progress, this temporal in-between refuses to fit into
Hegel’s system, its unifying illusions, and its romantic nostalgia for the slave as hero. It
is a presence that has been temporally relocated, drawn into a politics for which it is
always already too late. As such Hegel becomes a strategic moment, rather than a rigid
base upon which to declare the truth of being. Despite the claim that decolonisation has
needs to be set free from its white destination. Hegel thus provides a strategic position
from which to speak, but it is a position that demands to be erased in the moment that it
is effected. Hegel is thus asserted at that moment that he is crossed out. What this
means is that in rejecting Hegel Fanon actually embraces that contradictory moment
concerning the sublime slave without assuming an ethical essence. There is no yielding
to the labour of reason here, only Nietzsche’s defiant mastery. His gesture toward the
possibility of a future free from structures of dependence occupies a critical space that
speaks as a slave, but also attempts to cross out that speaking position. This is what is
position with a politics that seeks to abolish that moment of empowerment. Fanon can
thus never speak with the subversive assurance that occupies the ethical sublimity of
Kojève. And he also remains ambivalent about the negritude of Senghor and Cesaire
Fanon’s gesture pushes the Hegelian slave beyond the limits marked by that
thought. Caught strategically in-between a past hope and a future vision, Fanon’s is a
gesture that ultimately posits Hegel against Hegel. The violent relocation of Hegel
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effectively sets the Phenomenology to work against The Philosophy of History. Africa’s
exclusion from world history, and the hope that slavery opens up, when juxtaposed to
Hegel’s conviction concerning the power of the slave in his theorisation of the master
and slave relationship reveals a contradiction. Hegel in celebrating the slave of the
and renders the latter slave a power that Hegel’s racism refused to afford to the African.
history that moves from Africa to Europe, rather than from Asia to Europe, as Hegel’s
‘world history’ would have it. The self in order to overcome the unknown darkness
within, to subordinate that individual bodily desire to the universal, must pass through
the condition of slavery. The African slave, in having been excluded from world history
thus occupies a disturbing place at the edges of Hegel’s thought. In having written the
African out of world history, the Phenomenology positions the slave as the most
legitimate location from which to engage in questions of culture. The figure of the slave
is thus at once both inside and outside Hegel’s system. Here lies the terms of Fanon’s
ambivalence concerning Hegel, and also, as the thesis demands, the discourse of the
such a constitution.
postcolonial sublime can be staged. I would contend that in such a staging the aesthetic
moment that underpins Hegel’s system is unleashed. From the hidden spaces that mark
Hegel’s system, there emerges a threatening ‘other’, that defines what is at stake in the
mind when he celebrated the capacity of slavery to effect the progress of Spirit. A fear
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of death is the pre-requisite for the necessity of law and order in Hobbes.287 It seems
logical that the master’s abandonment of the fear of death is hardly a basis for
as a legitimating strategy for the modern state. But I would contend that in crossing out
Hegel, Fanon opens up the doubleness that haunts Hegel’s celebration/rejection of the
slave. For despite the seeming Hobbesian logic that animates the necessity of the slave
in the Phenomenology, that disturbing gesture toward the African in The Philosophy of
History remains at the edges of this celebration. Why celebrate one and not the other?
It seems, however, that this doubleness that I have suggested emerges in Fanon’s
ambivalence toward Hegel, can be found in the Phenomenology itself. For the slave
passes through two distinct phases that cannot be reduced to the order of the same. I
have suggested that Hegel’s basic problematic is animated by the desire to subordinate
the particular under the universal. This is effected through the gradual process of
overcoming individual desire, in the name of the universal. It is an ethical task that
seeks to make known what is hidden so that universal reason is able to dominate
selfhood, as the absolute. The interesting thing about the slave is that initially the slave
does the opposite, and refuses to allow the desire for life to be subordinated to the
universal, and yet it is the slave, despite Hegel’s system which rewards that
movement,288 who provides the spark that keeps the system moving. As such, the
system relies upon a double moment that exceeds the logic of the system. The slave’s
paradoxical reward reveals a thinking that is much more aesthetic in its enunciation than
Hegel’s system as a science demands. It is this aesthetic task, one in which hiddenness,
perhaps more accurately, the force of pure desire, the uncontained, that which precedes
and calls forth the necessity of system, reason’s opposite, is permitted to thrive. The
Phenomenology thus utilises what is hidden for its purposes. The hidden, the
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unreasonable force of bodily desire, becomes the sublime object upon which reason’s
the problem of the slave’s doubleness. Aristotle draws the problem of recognition into a
producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad
as in the Oedipus. … the recognition which is most intimately connected with the
plot and action is … the recognition of persons. This recognition, combined with
Reversal, will produce either pity or fear; and actions producing these effects are
What Aristotle reveals is that wherever recognition is in play, there is also a prior
hiddenness that dramatic tension is built. Hiddenness creates suspense, and animates
the plot structure; it is that missing something, the scandal that remains to be disclosed
in the dramatic climax. Tragedy as such depends upon hiddenness, it promotes it,
rewards it, and seeks to carve out intricate structures around it. Hegel’s master and
slave relationship is played in terms of such a dramatic tension. The hiddenness of the
slave drives and animates the unfolding of the master and slave relationship, and it is via
a hiddenness that the slave ultimately defies the master’s desire for disclosure, and is
able to carve out the possibility for transforming the limits of being. As a moment in a
philosophical system the master and slave relationship thus seems to owe more to the
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The possibility of Hegel’s celebratory claims concerning the power of reason, is
established when this hiddenness is made known. It can be seen that Hegel makes
reason’s task greater, for in Kant the excesses of reason, even though seductive, are
always ‘visible’. Reason in Hegel makes known what was formerly unknown, or at
least leaves the unknown behind. Knowledge progresses from darkness to light, from
the what was hidden to what can now be made visible. All is yielded up to the self-
consciousness reign of reason. In Hegel the manifestation of this progress can be found
in reason’s capacity to systematise. In other words, rather than a chaotic desire beyond
understanding, the capacity to bring order to such a manifold establishes the possibility
assimilating in rational form all the various knowledges and sciences in their
stripping them of their external features and in this way extracting from them the
logical element — or what is the same thing, filling the abstract basis of Logic
acquired by study with the substantial content of absolute truth and giving it the
particulars but includes them all within its grasp and is their essence, the
absolutely True.290
Reason’s authority is thus drawn up in terms of its capacity to unite disparate elements
under one system. Here again it is not reason’s fixity that is at issue. Rather it is
reason’s capacity to produce a unity from, what appears at first to be, a multiplicity
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(perhaps something like the discourses of multiculturalism). System(isation) is the
Now listen to the voice of the colonial as the multiplicity and the diversity of
These nations and races, divided by space and civilisation, by religion, policy,
the lines of allegiance which converge from every part to the throne. Not
Both Kant’s confidence and Hegel’s drama reveal that the sublime always
already emerges as an excessive object that demands the necessity of some kind of
clarity. In the case of Kant, reason establishes an experiential unity. In Hegel this
excess is contained via reason as system. But the problem of the slave of The
that this is because there remains within Hegel’s system a necessity, namely a figure of
hiddenness, that despite reason’s exploits must somehow remain consigned to the dark
spaces beyond reason’s pale. The figure of the African in The Philosophy of History
shows that despite the condition of slavery (as it is celebrated in the Phenomenology)
black Africa has been banished to a space of privation, exclusion, excess, that is as
much a signifier of reason’s exploits — what reason is not — as the increasing visibility
produces two kinds of slave. On the one hand, those unwilling to overcome sublime
fears, and on the other, those who embrace such fears and the inward journey to the
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absolute that they promote. How might these slave selves be distinguished? Fanon
In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of
uncertainty. I know that if I want to smoke, I shall have to reach out my right arm
and take the pack of cigarettes lying at the other end of the table. The matches,
however, are in the drawer on the left, and I shall have to lean back slightly. And
all these movements are made not out of habit but out of implicit knowledge. A
The black body, it would seem, gets in the way of a consciousness that is built upon
negating the body. The black body impairs such a negation, and thwarts the progress to
the absolute. The basis for the doubleness of the figure of the slave is a racial one.
Reason’s authority over the sensory is a white accomplishment. The black body
stands in its way. Self-consciousness arises when the body ceases to structure
With its crucial location in the structuring of self-consciousness, the Hegelian slave is
thus white. The black slave remains behind, ever the symbol of what reason has passed
master/slave dialectic sorts out reason’s terms. And as a space of sorting, polarises the
social world in racial terms. Whilst there is reason, the Phenomenology and The
Philosophy of History reveal that there, as Fanon puts it, “will always be a world — a
white world — between you and us”.293 What Fanon’s pointed engagement in Hegel
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effectively means, is that black Africans have been excluded even from the discourse of
the romantic slave. Cut out from this equation, ‘the wretched of the earth’, for Fanon,
potential of Hegel’s thought. From this two crucial issues emerge. Firstly, the category
problematic for the discourse of the postcolonial. Decolonisation effectively sets forth a
freedom that wipes out the possibility, for the formerly colonised, of speaking from the
space of the slave. In conservative thought such a space is reserved for its own
response to a growing resistance within, than a part of the processes of its own maturity.
Secondly, in its difficulty with the Kojèvean sublime, Fanon’s thought reveals that the
material condition of the black African ! the body in space and time ! in the context
As the closing sections of Black Skin, White Masks show, Fanon’s work can be
understood as a search for modes of thought and being that are able to inhabit, and
productively move beyond the gaps that emerge in the critical possibilities between
thinkers such as Hegel and Nietzsche. Neither seems to be able to articulate the
situation and the politics of the ‘fact of blackness’. I would contend, therefore, that
what Fanon offers is a way of dealing with the conservatism of Hegel’s thought. It is in
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Conclusion: The Sublime Postcolonial Body
Idealism does not hold out great hope for oppressed Africa. In countering
Idealism’s racism, Fanon declares, “I am not the slave of the Slavery that dehumanized
basis for a creative, cultural, and politically affirmative self. He demands that the black
body, that despised figure in Hegel’s architectonic system, become the site from which
“Fanon attempts to rewrite the body of colonised man, creating a new subject from the
dismemberment and castration inflicted by the coloniser’s destructive gaze. ... Fanon
equates a reanimated body with the liberated voice of the revolutionary intellectual”.295
It is not upon Hegel’s celebration of the romantic slave that this politics is built. Rather
political resonances of this space begin to emerge. Perhaps Hegel underestimated what
he dismissed so easily.
What Black Skin, White Masks in its complex erasure of Hegel’s master and
slave effects, is the notion that it is upon the black body, in seizing that body that the
defined in terms of the Hegelian dialectic, as an opposing force, for as we have seen the
black struggle has no political legitimacy in this space. Instead such a struggle must be
defined in relation to the dialectic, its rejected location within the system. Any voice
temporal oblivion, effectively means that Hegel’s system leaks. As Hegel sought to
shore up Kantian reason, to make its authority more robust than the slippage in Kant’s
appear. A politics of excess, of contamination begins to emerge; one which exposes the
fragility of the system, and exploits the borders that have been established to mark
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reason’s limits. On this border we can locate the work of Fanon. It is a space of
questioning, defiance, a space that attempts to push reason beyond the terms of its
limits. In many respects it is to be the object of the sublime, wrested from its inscription
exclude is to open up the sublime, to seize what is despised as the despised and to make
From the space of what I have called this temporal oblivion the cause of
resistance movements such as ‘negritude’ have been staged. Whilst Fanon concedes
that such a politics is necessary to a certain degree — recapturing the past in order to
legitimate a politics of the present and the future — ultimately he argues that it merely
replicates the myths of authenticity that have marked the violent effects of Western
Reason. Fanon instead proposes that the historical self that negritude seeks ought to be
taken as a given. In other words, that something that negritude seeks is always already
It is not enough to try to get back to the people in that past out of which they have
already emerged; rather we must join them in that fluctuating movement which
they are just giving a shape to, and which, as soon as it is started, will be the
signal for every-thing to be called in question. Let there be no mistake about it; it
is to this zone of occult instability where the people dwell that we must come.296
up of a past merely replays the structures of European thought, and fails to engage in the
productive possibilities that mark the present. This ‘zone of occult instability’, the zone
banished by Hegel, with its rhythms, fluctuations, sensuality, the messy world of the
everyday, of the body, is the site of such possibility. Fanon calls for a life founded upon
164
an openness to the diversity and richness of the earth’s vast fluxes, and a literature
forged in and through material existence, rather than the transcendence of a reason built
is a harsh style, full of images, for the image is the drawbridge which allows
style, alive with rhythms, struck through and through with bursting life. ... The
contact of the people with the new movement gives rise to a new rhythm of life
sublime in the hands of Fanon takes on a different role. It could be said that Fanon
more extreme form. Idealism’s romantic and confident ‘play’ upon the limits of reason
opens up an unpresentable in the form of nature, the divine, and the poetic hero who
manages to express what has otherwise been inexpressible. In such formulations, the
discourse of the sublime has been bestowed with a nobility befitting those who pretend
to the status of the most supreme expression of humanity. It is the domain of Genius, of
the Cultured, Educated, Civilised European man. But into the equation there bursts the
debased and the lowly, those that had effectively been excluded from history, denied
even the status of the slave. There lies within the discourse of the sublime, a darker and
much more threatening side, as far as reason is concerned. The figure of the other as
Within and against Hegelian self-consciousness and its preoccupation with the
systematic, Fanon’s black body emerges as a creative force that opens up the possibility
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and being must be found, rather than the legislation and negations of Idealism’s reason.
To question the capacity of Kant and Hegel is to contaminate reason with what it must
constantly face but is unable to countenance, the possibility of its demise. It is to open
brought into question. Such hesitation opens up the possibility of altering the
Fanon finds in the despised black body, the possibility of altering reason’s destination,
image of the exiled self in Bennett’s mirror (from chapter two of the thesis), caught in-
between the golden order of Kant and the violent chaos of dispossession, Fanon’s work,
toward a problematic which defies the unity of consciousness that marked Hegel, the
sublime elevation of reason over the body. Not content to say this is the colonial
subject, Fanon exceeds the possibility of the question. In this refusal, the defiance of
the systematic, the sublime as an excess from below, rather than above, disrupts the
confidence of reason, and changes the terms of its smooth ordering. In the course of
what I have called the fort/da of reason, the figure of Fanon’s black man cannot be
brought into the light of reason. His consciousness belongs to an order that cannot be
explained in terms of the discourse of the slave. Yet like the Hegelian slave such a
imaginative being that renders Hegel’s system incomplete. As George Lamming, in his
probing The Pleasures of Exile, in dealing with Hegel’s world history puts it, “what
166
disqualifies African man from Hegel’s World History is his apparent incapacity to
evolve with the logic of language which is the only aid man has in capturing the Idea.
African Man, for Hegel, has no part in the common pursuit of the Universal”. It is
interesting that Lamming combats such a notion with the aesthetic. Hegel’s
formulation, in the context of African poetry, effectively means the absurd notion “that
For the thesis, what Fanon’s engagement in Hegel opens up is a possibility for
articulating what a postcolonial sublime might be. In being faced with the task of
disrupting the violent effects of reason, Fanon’s postcoloniality seizes that which is
despised, the space of the sublime, that indispensable moment in reason’s fort/da, and
utilises it for ‘other’ purposes: namely opening up the question of being as affirmative
becoming, as actional rather than reactional. Such a critical strategy owes more to the
logic of contamination than pure opposition. Rather than deny the power of
conservatism outright, Fanon occupies spaces that have been marked for conservative
Having charted the notion that the sublime is an indispensable moment in the
discourse of reason, my task for the remainder of the thesis will be to continue outlining
what is at stake in a postcolonial politics that seizes the space of the sublime for its own
purposes. In order to continue opening up such a critical space, I will turn firstly to the
Lyotard’s refusal to engage in the Hegelian sublime makes his critical strategies
politically difficult for the discourse of the postcolonial. I will then turn to the work of
Bhabha for a more cogent understanding of what is at stake in the postcolonial sublime.
167
Kantian purity of Lyotard. It seems to me that a politics of contamination marks our
time, rather than the logic of differend. As I suggested in chapter one in my brief
a time marked by movement, change, and border crossings. This means that the
untenability of pure cultural sites remains a cancer that continues to threaten the pundits
the great weight that ought to be afforded to postcolonial contaminations. Finally, I will
turn to Rushdie in order to find a basis for a postcolonial politics that is rooted in what I
Notes
214
Arthur Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains in Four Volumes, ed. Arthur Hübscher,
trans. E. J. F. Payne (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1988), vol. 1, 480, 540.
215
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 205. See also
Robert Pippin’s useful account of Hegel’s indebtedness to Kant, in Hegel’s Idealism:
The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989), 16-41.
216
G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1969), 47, 51.
217
Hegel, Science of Logic, 51. See also Hegel’s The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F.
Geraets, W. A. Suchting, H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company,
1991). He writes: “it must be said that in its true and comprehensive significance the
universal is a thought that took millennia to enter into men’s consciousness; and it only
achieved its full recognition through Christianity. The Greeks, although otherwise so
highly cultivated, did not know God, or even man, in their true universality” (240).
218
Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, 286, 288.
219
G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1977), 54.
220
Hegel, Science of Logic, 56.
221
Friedrich von Schlegel, The Philosophy of Life and the Philosophy of Language in a
Course of Lectures, trans. A. J. W. Morrison, (1847, London: G. Bell & Sons, 1913),
389.
222
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 54.
168
223
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 142.
224
Hegel, Science of Logic, 51.
225
Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, 80.
226
Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience, trans. Harper & Row Publishers
(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1970), 33. See also Heidegger’s, Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1988). Heidegger writes, “with self-consciousness truth is generally at
home, on its own ground and soil” (130).
227
Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 136, 130.
228
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 105.
229
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr.,
ed. Allan Bloom (New York: Cornell University Press, 1980), 38.
230
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 106.
231
Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 39.
232
Homi Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition”, in
Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and
Laura Chrisman (Hemel Hempstead, England: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993) 114.
233
Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon”, 113.
234
Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon”, 115.
235
Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon”, 115, 120.
236
Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon”, 120.
237
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin
Milligan, ed. Dirk J. Struik (New York: Lawrence and Wishart, 1964), 110.
238
Renate Zahar, Frantz Fanon: Colonialism and Alienation (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1974), 92.
239
Michael Kelly, Hegel in France (Birmingham: Birmingham Modern Languages
Publications, 1992), 37.
240
According to Michael Kelly’s substantially complete inventory of publications
relating to Hegel published in French, from 1900-1944 there were 101 publications on
Hegel. From 1945-1955 there were 129. See Kelly, Hegel in France, 85-98.
169
241
See for instance Annie Cohen-Solal’s Sartre: A Life (London: Heinemann, 1988),
431-437, which details Fanon’s deep friendship with thinkers such as John-Paul Sartre
and Simone de Beaviour.
242
Shadia Drury, The Roots of Postmodern Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1994).
243
Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 22.
244
Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 21, 20.
245
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York:
Grove Press, 1967), 8.
246
Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1970), 18.
247
See also Frantz Fanon, “Racism and Culture”, in Toward the African Revolution:
Political Essays, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 29-44.
Fanon contends, “The setting up of the colonial system does not of itself bring about the
death of native culture. Historic observation reveals, on the contrary, that the aim
sought is rather a continued agony than a total disappearance of the pre-existing culture.
This culture, once living and open to the future, becomes closed, fixed in the colonial
status, caught in the yoke of oppression. Both present and mummified, it testifies
against its members. It defines them in fact without appeal. The cultural
mummification leads to a mummification of individual thinking” (34).
248
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (London:
Penguin, 1967), 28, 33.
249
I would argue that Kojève’s reading of Hegel is dubious. His bracketing of the slave
means that he fails to take Hegel’s conservatism into account. This bracketing strategy
can be seen in Lyotard’s reading of the Kantian sublime. An issue I will take up in
chapter four.
250
G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1975), vol. 1, 387.
251
Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1996),118.
252
Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans.
Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974),
170.
253
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 114.
254
Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 46.
255
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 117, 118.
170
256
G. W. F. Hegel, The Berlin Phenomenology, trans., ed., M. J. Petry (Dordrecht,
Holland: D. Reidel Publishing, 1981), 87.
257
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 9, 8, 10.
258
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 13.
259
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 111.
260
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 217.
261
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 219.
262
Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991
(London: Abacus, 1995), 216.
263
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 220.
264
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 221.
265
Julie Dowling, Julie Clampett (Perth: Art Gallery of Western Australia, 1995).
266
In the context of Hegel’s celebration of the great attainments of Spirit, the abolition
of slavery occupies a central place. In The Encyclopaedia Logic in a section dealing
with the supremacy of modern Europe over the ancients, he writes, “the genuine reason
why there are no longer any slaves in Christian Europe is to be sought in nothing but the
principle of Christianity itself” (240).
267
“Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aborigines”, in The Concept of
Empire: Burke to Attlee 1774-1947, ed. George Bennett (London: Adam & Charles
Black, 1962), 103.
268
G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover
Publications, 1956), 96, 98, 99.
269
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, n220-221.
270
Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 99, 93.
271
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 222. Fanon has Mounier’s L’Éveil De L’Afrique
Noire (1947) in mind.
272
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of Man, The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb
Fichte, vol. 1-2, trans. William Smith (London: Trübner, 1889). He writes, “I am I,
myself. … What I am, I know because I am it; and that whereof I know immediately
that I am it, that I am because I immediately know it. There is here no need of any tie
between subject and object; my own nature is this tie. I am subject and object: - and
this subject-objectivity, this return of knowledge upon itself, is what I mean by the term
‘I’” (381-382).
273
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 222.
171
274
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future”,
trans. Walter Kaufman, Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: The Modern Library,
1968), 394.
275
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human all too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans R. J.
Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 37.
276
Nietzsche “Beyond Good and Evil”, 395.
277
Nietzsche, Human all too Human, 36-37.
278
Nietzsche “Beyond Good and Evil”, 395.
279
Nietzsche “Beyond Good and Evil”, 397.
280
On this point I follow Gilles Delueze, and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor
Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
They assert, “the first characteristic of minor literature … is that in it language is
affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization … Prague German is a
deterritorialized language… (this can be compared in another context to what blacks in
America today are able to do with the English Language). The second characteristic of
minor literatures is that everything in them is political. … its cramped space forces each
individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. … The third characteristic of
minor literature is that in it everything takes on a collective value … there are no
possibilities for an individuated enunciation that would belong to this or that “master”
and that could be separated from a collective enunciation (16- 17).
281
See Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Falsity in their Ultramoral Sense”, in The
Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 2, ed. Oscar Levy (London: Allen and
Unwin, 1924), 173-191.
282
Nietzsche “Beyond Good and Evil”, 394.
283
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale
(New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 550.
284
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 546.
285
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 12-13.
286
See Léopold Senghor (“Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century”, in The
Africa Reader: Independent Africa, ed. Wilfred Cartey and Martin Kilson (New York:
Vintage Books, 1970), 170-192), who draws Bergson (a thinker embroiled in the
problematics of Idealism), into the foundation of a negritude, that “humanism of the
twentieth century”, as he calls it. This critical move seeks to open up the possibility,
Senghor writes, of “rooting oneself in oneself, and self-confirmation: confirmation of
one’s being” (180, 179).
287
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin, 1985), 102.
172
288
Interestingly Hegel celebrates the French revolution in terms that amount to a
celebration of the progressive possibilities of mastery. In a Letter to Zellman (1807),
Hegel writes: “Thanks to the bath of her Revolution, the French Nation has freed herself
of many institutions which the human spirit had outgrown like the shoes of a child.
These institutions accordingly once oppressed her, and now they continue to oppress
other nations as so many fetters devoid of spirit. What is even more, however, is that
the individual as well has shed the fear of death … along with the life of habit — which,
with the change of scenery, is no longer self-supporting. This is what gives this Nation
the great power she displays against others. She weighs down upon the impassiveness
and dullness of these other nations, which, finally forced to give up their indolence in
order to step into actuality, will perhaps … surpass their teachers” (“Hegel to Zellman”,
Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984), 123.
289
Aristotle, The Poetics of Aristotle, trans. S. H. Butcher (London: Macmillan and Co.,
1902), 41.
290
Hegel, Science of Logic, 59.
291
Bernard Holland, “The Crown and the Empire”, in The Empire and the Century
(London: John Murray, 1905), 34.
292
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 110-111.
293
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 122.
294
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 230.
295
Michael Dash, “In Search of the Lost Body: Redefining the Subject in Caribbean
Literature”, Kunapipi, vol. 11, no. 1 (1989), 24.
296
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 182-183.
297
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 177, 194.
298
George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (London: Michael Joseph, 1960), 32.
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Chapter Four
take up the critical oscillation that has produced the terrain of this thesis. As I suggested
from the outset, this charting of the postcolonial sublime has been engendered by the
hybridity. Each questions the terms in which universalist systems are drawn up. Each
between these bodies of thought demand to drawn up. I would wish to contend that the
postcolonial sublime departs from the terms of the postmodern sublime, as theorised by
Lyotard. As I argued in the previous chapter, Fanon’s seizure of the black body, to
disruptions of the postmodern sublime. With the material excess of Fanon’s politics in
philosophical basis as charted in Le Differend, and outlines the basis for championing
the postcoloniality of Fanon, Bhabha, and Rushdie over the Lyotard of the differend.
possibilities that Kant opens up like Lyotard. Indeed his work in the late seventies to
the mid eighties seems to directly correspond to Kant’s critical concerns in the three
justice, and can be contrasted to Critique of Practical Reason. And Le Differend takes
up the question of political judgement, and directly utilises the Critique of Judgement.
174
In the wake of recent terrors such as Nazism and the former Soviet Union,299 and the
in chapter one, Lyotard’s celebration of the genuine sentiment of the sublime, novatio,
in which the unpresentable form continually opens up new possibilities for thinking and
being, is staged in opposition to the sublime’s dark side, nostalgia, in which the
have sought to underscore the ‘colonial qualities’ of Kant’s work, specifically his
For Lyotard the radical incommensurability of the faculties in Kant means that
ethics can never be reduced to the aesthetic order. The sublime, which appears as the
abyss between the faculties, attests to the impossibility of such a reduction. Lyotard’s
“The ‘mere appendage’ to the critical elaboration of the aesthetic”, Lyotard tells us, “by
natural finality ... takes a menacing turn. It indicates that another aesthetic can be not
only expounded but ‘deduced’ according to the rules of the critique”.303 Given its
becomes, for Lyotard, the most apt analogy for (re)opening questions concerning art,
justice, and politics.304 In what emerges as Kant’s cognisant failure, the continual
opening up of this failure as novatio in art, and differend in politics, radically disrupts
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Given Lyotard’s affinity to Kant, my aim in this chapter will be to interrogate
the politics that Lyotard sets forth. I would wish to argue that his critical Kantianism,
stake in the discourse of the postcolonial. This is not to say that Lyotard is of little
chapter one, that the discourse of the postcolonial with its emphasis upon excess,
distinction between the critical concerns of the discourse of the postcolonial and the
critical distance from Kant, as exploited by Fanon, provides a more apt basis for
thinking through what is stake in a postcolonial sublime. I will begin with Lyotard’s
The French Revolution, that vast exercise in purification and Terror, transfixed,
perhaps like no other eighteenth-century event, the people of Western Europe. Incisive
in its impact upon art, politics, and morality, the revolution was no where more
dramatically felt than in the realms of philosophy and literature. The radical idealist
Fichte, for instance, celebrated the freeing of the self “from external shackles”. The
revolution engaged Fichte “in an inner struggle”, and became an exemplary moment in
the staging of a philosophical system which frees the self from “the fetters of things in
themselves”.306 Hegel too, whilst distancing himself from what he considered the
abstract nature of the Idea of the revolution,307 described it as a “glorious mental dawn”
that was rightly celebrated by “all thinking beings”. The revolution was an historical
moment in which “a lofty character stirred”, with such an “enthusiasm” of the spirit that
it “thrilled through the world”.308 Kant, in contrast, rather than champion the events of
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the revolution itself, sought to underscore the gap between the event and its spectators
spectators … this mode of thinking demonstrates a character of the human race at large
political, and historical effects draw upon a language that sought to carve out a space for
the autonomous self to be realised in the social world. As I have suggested throughout,
the Idealist self coincides with European expansionism. Terms such as “inner struggle”,
who believed that the world is made meaningful through, and only through, the subtle
global stage. Celebrated both directly and indirectly, the revolution symbolised the
Celebrated directly, the revolution simply erased the past and presented a clean
slate for humanity to rewrite itself (Fichte). It also generated such an enthusiasm of
Spirit that it signalled nothing less than the ultimate supremacy of the reasonable self
(Hegel). But unlike Fichte and Hegel, Kant judged the revolution in terms of the
incommensurability of the faculties, and the play of the faculty of judgement in its
aesthetic mode. A “disinterestedness”, as he puts it, reveals that the revolution merely
‘feeling’ of progress rather than determinate empirical evidence of the same. Free from
the object, the idea of historical progress as an aesthetic feeling reveals the (dangerous)
indeterminacy that lies at the core of the faculty of judgement. Kant declares:
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in the family of the supreme cognitive faculties there is a middle term between the
understanding and the reason. This is the judgement, of which we have cause for
this language in this thesis. Not content to separate the aesthetic from knowledge and
morality, or to explain knowledge and morality via the aesthetic as analogy, I have
argued that the aesthetic is contaminated by the cultural as the cultural is contaminated
by the aesthetic. What this means in the context of this attempt to distinguish the
postcolonial from the postmodern, is that for the postcolonial the aesthetic remains less
‘pure’ than Lyotard would have it. Lyotard argues that the faculty of judgement, as it is
dramatically called upon by Kant to force “‘passages’ between the faculties”, reveals at
the same time, however, “a major flaw … in the area of its ability to know an object
that would be proper to it”. The remarkable thing about the faculty of judgement is that
“it has no determined object”,311 and is thus forced to find its own principle without
here inspires Lyotard to link the feelings of Kant’s enthusiastic spectators to the feelings
that are attended to by the sublime. Kant refused to champion the horrifying events of
the revolution itself, yet at the same time found in the Idea of the revolution — freedom
— a great joy. I will take issue with the place of the French revolution in postmodern
thought through the work of Bhabha in the following chapter. I draw attention to Kant’s
celebration of the revolution at this point in order to reveal the philosophical basis for
178
In the face of the revolution’s tumultuous events, the spectators felt both pain
and pleasure. I have charted what I consider to be the conservative basis for Kant’s
work upon the sublime in chapter two. The pain and the pleasure of the sublime
reason, and with it the “superiority” and moral worth of humanity in the face of terror,
rise up and are able to reign supreme.312 But Lyotard puts the sublime to a different use.
He argues that the sublime moment, which establishes the supremacy of the Ideas over
the terrifying in nature, signals that at the core of the revolution’s celebrated freedom
theoretical and practical reason. What becomes crucial is that the Ideas as regulating
principles, in order to be realised, must utilise the faculty of judgement, which is forced
to link the structures that mark thought. Such a linkage, since the faculty of judgement
does not function in terms which correspond to objects but must search for the rules of
its own operation, is forced to function by way of analogy, to make links between the
various faculties ‘as if’ they were the same.313 This means that the idea of freedom
itself can be characterised not just in terms of the regulatory effects that it attends to
upon the faculty of judgement, but also, crucially, the idea means that ultimately
freedom as an empirical state never actually arrives, since ideas call forth the necessity
for the constant search for the rules of its own regulating principle. As such judgement
indeterminacy, such that judgement, in what ever form, is forced to stage itself in terms
of the search for rules, rather than the operation of a determinate concept. The
indeterminate nature of judgement, however, rather than being cause for lament,
becomes the philosophical ground for questioning conventional political and artistic
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forms, and provides the basis for an affirmative and practical understanding of
(in)justice.
With the indeterminacy that lies at the core of Lyotard’s call for new modes of
art and politics in mind, I would wish to ask: how does such a reformulation of art and
politics figure in the discourse of the postcolonial? In the context of this thesis, this
question can be formulated thus: if the discourse of the postcolonial takes as its object
the complex relationship of the former colonisers and formerly colonised world, and
seeks to evoke slippages and excesses, points of uncertainty that expose and disrupt
process? In order to deal with this question, it will be necessary to outline Lyotard’s
aesthetic and political theories. I will turn initially to his work on the event and the
avant-garde, and then make my way to The Differend. My strategy will be to seize,
what David Carroll insightfully calls, “the minimal element, or ‘zero degree’” of
aesthetic and political theories open up are built upon a single moment within
representation: the avant-garde as event, the phrase as event. I would wish to question
with the totalising theories of Marx, and perhaps to a lesser extent Freud,315 much is
demanded of the temporal singularity of the event, and the critical possibilities that this
temporal caesura opens up. Lyotard’s analysis of the sublime and the avant-garde, as it
is set forth in the collection of essays The Inhuman, links the event to the sublime, and
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emerges in his argument as the “time” that is “a stranger to consciousness and cannot be
formulate”. Linked to the analytic of the sublime this marks “an irreversible deviation
in the destination of art, a deviation affecting all the valencies of the artistic
The upshot of this argument is two fold. On the one hand it presents the notion that the
conventional notions concerning representation, politics and justice. On the other hand,
the temporal nature of the event anxiously prevents the reign of the sublime imagination
In the context of this thesis, what this insistence upon the event amounts to is a
basis for disrupting totalising accounts of history, such as that of Hegel. The object of
Lyotard’s critical work, like the discourse of the postcolonial, is essentially the
reasonable grounds for totalising history. The issue that I would wish to take with
Lyotard’s work, thus concerns the terms of such a critique. Does this evoking of the
event lead to the affirmative ruptures that I have suggested mark the discourse of the
further insight into the nature of the event. Then I will make my way to the working out
undertaking is the notion that an avant-gardist work is less a representational object than
an event that occurs in a temporal instant, a now, which includes the act of the gaze and
the aesthetic ‘feeling’ that that temporal instant effects. What is at issue is that the
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which it stands in for something other than itself, in the cognitive realm. The actual
paint on the canvas, the formal (dis)organisation of pigment, has a life of its own that
thought. The avant-garde thus evokes a moment that occupies a non-conceptual, non-
This remarkable claim finds its basis in Lyotard’s detailed engagement in Kant’s
analytic of aesthetic judgement, which he reads not in terms of the necessary ‘bridge’
between theoretical and practical reason, the ‘method’ of the critique, but in terms of the
critique’s “manner”, in order to reveal that an aesthetic moment accompanies every act
an attractive object” and the manner in which thought lingers before itself, writes:
before an inquiry into the a priori conditions of judgements can be made, critical
thought must be in a reflective state … Thought must “linger”, must suspend its
adherence to what it thinks it knows. It must remain open to what will orientate
As Kant would have it, a priori thinking must always linger in that moment in which
thought encounters the sensations (colour etc.) that necessarily accompany it. This
means that Reason cannot function without the aesthetic. But it remains to be seen
whether or not, in light of the notion that the aesthetic in Kant is a necessary moment in
the construction of reason’s authority, this unleashing of the sublime in this “manner” is
architectonic system that we can begin to deal with the critical possibilities of avant-
gardist art. The avant-garde foregrounds the sensation that is otherwise hidden,
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forgotten, or negated in representational art forms. Crucially it is the instant in which
sensation occurs, and nothing more that is at issue here. The aesthetic feeling that is
event, which does “not reside in an over there, in another word, or another time”. As
Lyotard understands it, the task of the avant-garde is, therefore, to guard “the
occurrence ‘before’ any defence, any illustration, and any commentary, guarding before
being on one’s guard, before ‘looking’ ... under the aegis of now”.319
Against the Hegelian celebration of art as the expression of Ideas, an art of the
avant-garde testifies to the possibility of the event. The notion of art as event leads
Lyotard’s aesthetic considerations to the Kantian and the Burkean senses of the sublime.
feeling of pain and pleasure that is characterised by the pathos of the sublime. Lyotard
writes:
Here then is an account of the sublime feeling: a very big, very powerful object
threatens to deprive the soul of any ‘it happens’, strikes it with ‘astonishment’ …
The soul is thus dumb, immobilized, as good as dead. Art, by distancing this
returned to the agitated zone between life and death, and this agitation is its health
The staging of the avant-garde in the agitated zone — the passage of life that is always
already threatened by death — sets forth crucial possibilities for art and theory. There is
consciousness in which ‘nothing further happens’, as Lyotard puts it. Life thus equates
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to a resistance to closure, and can be characterised as the constant search for rules, the
desire for the possibility of an infinite stream of the ‘something happens’. Such an
possibility, rather than a systemisation that divides and subsumes all before it. The
agitated zone is a space that is characterised by that split in the self that Freud alluded to
when anal eroticism is threatened by the smell of shit, such that satisfaction is forced
“away from its sexual aim towards sublimations and displacements of libido”.322 The
subject in this Freudian moment is caught between an unlimited pleasure that does not
recognise the boundaries of being, Eros, and the knowledge of being in decay, and the
being in decay, mortality, yet also testifies to the possibility of resistance to closure,
thus produces the double effect of pain and pleasure: the inevitable nothing is happening
The avant-gardist testifies that here and “now there is this painting, rather than
nothing”.323 The ‘feeling’ that constitutes this instant emerges as a pure event, divorced
from thinking that reveals a knowledge of objects. The avant-garde lays bare the
conditions upon which consciousness is constructed. Thought in this instant runs into
invent, within the frame of this failure, new patterns of thinking. As an art form the
avant-garde thus challenges conventional modes of thought, which deny, forget, that
conscious thought is built upon the unstable foundation that feeling as an event evokes.
Formally the avant-gardist gives “up the imitation of models that are merely beautiful”,
in order to “try out surprising, strange, shocking combinations” in order to evoke this
instability. The task is to allow the event, “to present the fact that there is an
unpresentable ... to make seen what makes one see, and not what is visible”.324 As such
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The unpresentable does not lie outside representation as a content that exceeds possible
forms. The point is that representation is itself built upon what is already an
unpresentable moment.
The event as a pure instant325 that precedes subordination to cognition thus opens
up the possibility, perhaps necessity, for a search for new ways of thinking and being.
is able to push the limits of consciousness beyond the teleological schemes of culture
and society. Invention is enabled in that excessive moment that the event marks, and
pushes thought beyond its limits. The avant-garde sets itself the task of unleashing this
moment of excess, and it is crucial that this is continually opened up, lest art itself ends
in death as Hegel would have it. The avant-garde is thus marked by the endless search
for the excessive moment that disrupts the rules that constitute conventional thought. It
not unlike the Nietzschean nomad, that radically indeterminate self that is free from the
conventional constraints of time and space, that Fanon ultimately found difficult to fully
avant-garde we can hear a romantic nostalgia for an authentic, pure space for Art, and
the event, within the social domain. I would wish to take issue with the purity of the
contention that the discourse of the postcolonial cannot be reduced to the pure aesthetic
that Lyotard stages. This purity emerges in his lament concerning the critical reception
of the avant-garde. In what could be called a reverse of the romantic poet Shelley, who
sought to discover the transcendent order that makes all apparent realities possible,326
Lyotard would wish to underscore the structural resistance to order that lies at the edges
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of thought, and that threatens in every instant the stability of apparent reality. Thus
rather than develop the political possibilities of this disorder in his work on the avant-
garde and the sublime (in this construction this is still waiting in the wings), Lyotard,
like Shelley, merely mourns the misunderstood value of art’s capacity within the social.
The destination of the avant-garde lies not with the ultimate triumph of the event, but is
regrettably “dissolved into the calculation of profitability, the satisfaction of needs, self-
affirmation through success”.327 Lyotard thus does not move beyond outlining the
formal parameters of a ‘questioning’ art, and as a conclusion merely laments the failure
We can sum up the event as follows. The event, that pure instant in the
imagination, is not reducible to what has gone before, or to a vision for the future. It
makes no promises, and resists being subordinated to past understanding. The pure
instant in all of its indeterminate glory is pitted against the pure promises of political
visionaries. The sublime as event emerges as a disorder, an excess, which, in its pure
form, the singularity of its moment, is a guarantee, it seems, against the orders of
totalitarianism and the terror of nostalgia. But at the same time the event refuses the
status of a dangerous abstraction, and emerges as a force within the domain of the
social, since it calls forth the demand for judgement. It is the demand of this instant,
judgement, that calls forth a radical rethinking of questions of politics and justice. It is
thus time to allow The Differend to find its way out of the peripheries to take centre
stage in my engagement in Lyotard’s work. In preparing the ground for the postcolonial
formulations of Bhabha, as I will chart them in the following chapter, I would wish to
consider what I have called the problematic purity of the Lyotardian event in his
engagement in the question of politics. In my struggle with both Lyotard and Bhabha,
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contemporary national politics in the West hinges upon the purity of the Lyotardian
event.
I have maintained that Lyotard stages the question of art in terms that directly
relate to the problem of conscious thought that arises in Kant, namely the conflation of
the question of the subject and the question of the subjective. I would suggest that
Lyotard at every turn resists questions that deal with art’s social and institutional
and its relation to subjective thought. It seems to me that after Lyotard, to think the
sublime one must think merely in terms of the problems of the subtle movements of
for itself, that the work of Fanon, with its bodily excesses takes issue. In reading The
Differend one of the most striking things is that in its work upon the problems of
representation bodies are strangely absent, or are at best, simply reduced to the orders of
language.329 It is significant that The Differend, Lyotard’s most important work on the
question of politics, maintains this insistence upon the subjective, as opposed to the
bodily. The Differend is built upon the logical extension of the singularity of the event
that is occasioned by the sublime ‘failure of expression’, and attempts to set forth, if we
are to attempt to rescue the work from its pessimistic disposition concerning justice, the
Lyotard’s sublime, in keeping with Kant, is strictly a problem concerning the subtle
material sublime, and, what can be considered, Lyotard’s insistence, after Kant, upon
One wonders why Lyotard insisted upon the realms of thought and language, as
opposed to the messy world of the material everyday. Lyotard’s turn to the questions of
187
justice and politics demands clearly marked analytical categories, rather than ‘muddy’
ones. Such a demand for a ‘clean’ analytic, however, is problematic. It is precisely the
question of analytical clarity that is the object of the material disruptions of Fanon.
Lyotard works from the stability of theory in order to disrupt. Fanon works from the
messy location of culture, in order to disrupt what Lyotard asserts as a starting point. I
The task of art, as we have seen, is to provide an occasion for the event. If in the
realm of art the event opens up the possibility for an artful experimentation and
invention, in the realm of the social the possibility of experimentation and invention, if
at all possible, is occasioned by phrase events and the differends that they effect. In its
a differend … would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that
arguments. One side’s legitimacy does not imply the other’s lack of legitimacy.
differend as though it were merely a litigation would wrong (at least) one of them
This general introduction reveals the emptiness that lies at the heart of political
judgement. The differend is defined in terms of a lack, the “lack of a rule” that
accompanies social dispute. What is at issue is that there are certain kinds of dispute
that give rise to an instant in which thought is called upon to make a judgement, but
fails to find a readily available rule to be able to equitably meet this end. This failure in
this instant forces thought to invent a rule to judge the event, since no determinate rule
can be found. Thought is thus forced to function reflectively in order to carry out this
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necessary task. The differend entails the failure of thought to be able to deal with what it
encounters, and calls forth the necessity of invention in the realm of political judgement
empiricism, Rousseau too) is revealed to be flawed, since, in certain instances, the lack
of a determinate rule forces political judgement into a reflective state. The assumed
stability of a politics that rests upon an empiricist authority, preoccupied with its own
content, is thus disrupted. Whilst the differend’s “vengeance is on the prowl”331 the
When thought encounters the failure of expression in the domain of the social
there is, however, the possibility that this failure can become an occasion for the reign
of terror, for injustice, rather than an openness to the affirmative possibilities that
differends open up. An injustice is occasioned, in this equation, if it is the case that
thought fails to find a determinate rule to judge, and this failure is taken as a signal that
the phrase that presents the case concerning the referent is not valid. In this instance the
differend has been suppressed. Rather than turn to the demand for invention that this
calls forth (though there is a problem with this formulation that I will deal with in due
course), this thought refuses to budge from the domain of the determinate, and acts as if
the dispute is a case of litigation. The addressee of the phrase that seeks expression is
thus silenced, and rendered a pragmatic location within the discursive universe that is
unjust.
For the most part, as Lyotard’s examples testify, the differend is ignored and
social disputes are treated as cases of litigation. It seems to be the case that the
dominant idiom and the dominant party are synonymous in this formulation. The
suppression of the ‘lack of a determinate rule’ via a dominant idiom usually favours the
dominant party in the dispute. We can assume that ‘dominance’ in this instance can be
drawn up around questions of race, gender, and class, and as such much of the work
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involves an interrogation of the structures which give rise to the silences that these
categories effect.
gas chambers at Auschwitz. This is enacted by the logic: to see is to bear witness, but to
‘truly’ bear witness to death in a gas chamber one has to die in a gas chamber.332 The
consequence of this difficulty is that the survivors were prevented access to testifying
include: the workers that “have had to and will have to speak of their labor … as if it
were … a commodity of which they were the owners” (Lyotard suggests that with “the
logic of Capital, the aspect of Marxism that remains alive is, at least, this sense of the
differend, which forbids any reconciliation of the parties in the idiom of either one of
them”;333 “Marxism has not come to an end, as the feeling of differend”);334 there is also
postmodern]”;335 and we can add, the logic that the publisher cannot fail to publish
major works, because no one has ever read a major work which hasn’t been
published;336 and Heidegger’s insistent silence about the Nazis and the Jews as a
consequence of his failure to embrace the differend between thought on Being and
thought on Law, his failure to be open to a sublime “art” which says not the unsayable,
“but … that it cannot say it”.337 The critical import of the work is thus to testify to the
instant of the differend, which has the potential to open up the question of judgement, to
push thought beyond conventional limits toward an inventive, playful, and perhaps
the phrase regimen, proper names, and genres of discourse. My aim at this point will be
to detail the function of each component. If we are to take issue with the work it is
necessary to engage at this ‘nuts and bolts’ level. It is here that we will find certain
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difficulties and assumptions that reveal the limits of Lyotard’s attempt to rethink the
political. I would wish to question, as I have suggested, the temporal relation of the
phrase to genres of discourse. It seems to me that the introduction of the phrase event,
and the question of linkage that it calls forth, merely asserts a starting point that is
‘rooted’ in the indeterminate, as opposed to a starting point that works from the material
condition of the social. Each sets up a causal chain that produces a specific
understanding of what constitutes a just politics. The problem for Lyotard, however, is
that it is questionable that his own work itself, and the demand for bearing witness to
differends, is actually rooted in the indeterminate as the work suggests. Lyotard’s later
thought a just politics. As such the possibility of a differend rooted in the indeterminate
sublime seems dubious. Moreover the opening of the work seems to defy this sublime
… The weariness with regard to ‘theory’ … The time has come to philosophize”338 bear
It is significant that The Differend draws upon the discursive in order to rework
the question of politics. As I stated, there is a remarkable lack of bodies here. Having
said this, however, readers must be careful to attend to the nuances that the discursive
and language in this context give rise. It would be a mistake, for instance, to think the
with its disruptions to self presence and determinate mimetic truth, or as a kind of
Nietzschean perspectivism. In terms of the latter, The Differend’s emphasis upon the
Condition and Just Gaming, marks an important refinement in Lyotard’s search for a
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more just sense of political judgement. I would thus suggest, after underscoring the
importance of the subjective, that for Lyotard the discursive functions, in the context of
The Differend, as the conscious surface upon which the social writes itself, and upon
which the social is written. Lyotard is concerned with the question of what can and
can’t be phrased upon, what I would wish to call, the discursive surface. As such the
discursive surface calls forth a pragmatics, an ethics of the phrase. Rather than the
linguistic problem of meaning, which is concerned with the content of messages passed
from subject to subject, the problem of meaning that the phrase evokes is inseparably
linked to ethical questions. The question of politics thus emerges in terms of this phrase
ethics, since to deny a phrase, as we have seen, is to deny a social space. My contention
is that such a pragmatics does not seem to ‘capture’ the postcolonial, or provide an
adequate model for critique. As opposed to the excesses and contaminations of the
continue unpacking the outworking of the indeterminate judgement that Lyotard draws
from the Kantian sublime. Lyotard’s systematic ‘phraseology’ — in which the political
The phrase regimen can be located at the edges of thought, and, subsequently,
marks the edges of being. I would suggest that Lyotard conflates thought and being, or
indeterminate basis for thought. Phrases reside in that ‘twilight zone’, that paradoxical
space that marks the limits of thought, and yet is also the point from which thought
begins. It is crucial to note that the phrase doesn’t in any sense precede the self, and the
self doesn’t precede the phrase. Any consideration of the self by default thus becomes a
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phrase”,339 there is no transcendent outside which determines the self and its location in
We may wonder about the body, the material world, and the unconscious (all
crucial elements for the discourse of the postcolonial). But again these are inseparable
from the discursive surface, since this surface itself doesn’t consist of language in the
as such cannot be separated from the body and its location in the material world.
Phrases can include a range of gestures from speech itself, to the acts and feelings of the
phenomenological body: “A wink, a shrugging of the shoulder, a taping of the foot [sic],
dog’s tail, the perked ears of a cat … And a tiny speck to the West rising upon the
horizon of the sea … — A silence”.340 The phrase can be understood as any act or thing
which there simply is nothing beyond the phrase, no space or site that can in some sense
be occupied by something other than what always must be: conscious thought. It is not
possible to speak of an empirical outside,341 such as objects, or empty space, the body as
if it exists independent of phrases, and to phrase the ultimate end is to evoke Zeno’s
paradoxical logic. We can only gesture toward what could be considered the
nothingness that marks the end of all phrases, that moment in which conscious thought
finally ceases, when the sun explodes and the earth disappears such that “thought will
have stopped — leaving that disappearance absolutely unthought of”.342 For the time
being the discursive surface remains, and it is all that there is. Social being presents
itself to thought in and through phrases, thought “is inseparable from the
contend, however, that these Lyotardian formulations remain too neat, too pure to be
politically useful. My aim at this point, will be to continue charting what I have called
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Lyotard’s problematic purity. My contention is that the contaminations and disturbing
excesses of the discourse of the postcolonial exceed the possibilities that Lyotard’s neat
The differend, as I have suggested, is inhabited by the logic of the event. In this
instance this logic is built upon the sure foundation, for much is demanded, of the
the case … which is its referent; what is signified about the case, the sense … that
to which or addressed to which this is signified about the case, the addressee; that
‘through’ which or in the name of which this is signified about the case, the
The remarkable thing about the phrase is that it consists simply of the empty relation
between various instances: the addressor, addressee, referent, and sense. It is important
to note that there is no content here in the conventional sense, waiting to burst forth
upon the social. Rather the phrase, as Lyotard writes, “is an event”,345 that is to say an
“Is it happening”, which is distinct from “what happens” and “which is not tautological
with what has happened”.346 The phrase is a temporal phenomenon, a pure instant
which is designed, as I have suggested, to ward off being hijacked in the service of
totalitarian regimes. The instances in the specific phrase occur, unpredictably, without a
teleology, in an instant. The meaning of the phrase, its stakes, its use, always arrives as
an afterthought.
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creates a vacuum, a point of low pressure, to use a physical metaphor, which is also a
kind of demand toward which other phrases are forced to rush. There is no sense in
which the event of the phrase is preceded by anything, the event itself is a sign that
feeling that something is yet to be said, and the waiting for the moment of this
occurrence. Here we can locate what is crucial about the phrase, and begin to
understand how it relates to the social, and ultimately to whether or not Lyotard’s
consideration of the social stands or falls. This occurs in that moment in which Lyotard
announces that this feeling and this waiting, which seems remarkably similar to the
feeling of pain and pleasure that precedes the thought that encounters the avant-garde,
itself doesn’t in any sense precede the phrase, it actually is the phrase.
You can’t say everything. … But you certainly accept … ‘that something asks to
be put into phrases’? — This does not imply that everything ought to or wants to
be said. This implies the expectant waiting for an occurrence … that indeed
everything has not been said. … This waiting is in the phrase universe. It is the
specific ‘tension’ that every phrase regimen exerts upon the instances.347
The phrase occurrence presents the initial moment in the process that gives rise to what
A phrase presents a universe. No matter what its form, a phrase entails a There is
... whether it is marked or not in the form of the phrase. What is entailed by a
addressor, addressee, sense) which can be marked or not in the form of the phrase.
The phrase is not a message passed from an addressor to an addressee who remain
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independent of it. The latter are situated in the universe that the phrase presents,
together with the referent and the sense. … The phrase universe is not presented to
universe.348
The “Is it happening” presents a “There is”, a specific universe designated by the
regimen of the phrase. The universe presented by the phrase cannot be understood in
a void, a relation between its instances, and as such appears as a question that demands
inside its own regimen”350 — that opens up the necessity for other phrases, through the
process of linkage, to compete to make the phrase mean. The phrase is meaningless in
this sense in its own terms. Reality, that thing that we all engage in everyday without
quite knowing what it is, begins in this remarkable social theory as a void, a question
I have suggested that the phrase universe appears in the form of a question that
makes a demand upon the discursive surface. The form that this questioning takes,
however, does not appear in isolation, but arises in relation to other phrases in and
around the specific sites that make up the discursive surface. For Lyotard the discursive
should not be understood in the definitive sense, but simply as a linguistic orientation,
through the naming things. The proper name is a linguistic marker that designates
specific objects, places, people. Here Lyotard leans upon the antidescriptivism of Saul
Kripke’s famous “Naming and Necessity” lectures in the sixties. A logician, he argued
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that proper names designate the same object even if there has been a change in the state
of that object. The descriptive phrase ‘the first Emperor of France’, for instance,
designates Napoleon. Historically the truth value of the phrase can be validated, but this
situation is not a necessity. The Emperor of France could have been Barry, instead of
Napoleon. What this means, as far as Kripke is concerned, is that this descriptive
phrase does not appear to be rigid. Its designation, even though the descriptive phrase
remains the same, does not remain constant. ‘Napoleon’ on the other hand, is a rigid
designator, since there are circumstances that depend upon the proper name ‘Napoleon’
as ‘Napoleon was born in Corsica’, for instance, the truth of the phrase depends upon no
one else but ‘Napoleon’.352 What this suggests is that the proper name possesses a
particular property. Its social working cannot be understood in terms of the notion that
there is a descriptive phrase that precedes and defines it. Proper names as rigid
designators have a deictic quality. They are rigid yet empty signifiers.
problematic demand for analytic purity. As I showed in chapter one, the discourse of
the postcolonial remains far from pure. It is precisely contaminations and excesses that
mark the political cogency of the discourse of the postcolonial. Such excess renders the
analytic purity of Lyotard dubious. Thus as Lyotard leans upon the empty but rigid
nature of proper names, I would contend that for the discourse of the postcolonial
proper names demand to located in material struggle. I will take this issue up in due
course. It will be useful at this point to continue with the question of the phrase and the
other phrases form heterogeneous phrase families, or regimens, that cannot be reduced
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infinite number of possibilities: prescriptives, descriptives, cognitives, declarations,
evaluations, etc. Phrases directly affect the referent of a single proper name by situating
it upon different instances in the universe they present. The meaning of the proper
name for Lyotard thus remains indeterminate since its appearance within the phrase
shifts from phrase to phrase, and across phrase regimens. The proper name functions as
the site for the clash of phrase regimens, as they rush toward the void that has been
opened up by the phrase in its engagement with proper names, which emerge as empty
Is it possible that the number of senses attached to a named referent and presented
by phrases substitutable for its name increases without limit? Try to count, while
respecting the principle of substitutability, the phrases which are substitutable for
names like Moses, Homer, Pericles, Caesar. ... It cannot be proven that
everything has been signified about a name (that “everything has been said about
x”) not only because no such totality can be proven, but because the name not
being by itself a designator of reality (for that to occur a sense and an ostensible
referent need to be associated with it), the inflation of senses that can be attached
Proper names are thus the site for the clash of heterogeneous phrase universes.
Because of the emptiness of the phrase, and the fact that there is nothing beyond it, the
understood as that agitated zone, that Lyotard alluded to in his work on the sublime and
possibility that the phrase itself will fail to be linked to other phrases in the process of
the social. There is no option, no possibility of asking, should there be a link, should
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there not? In the “vigil for an occurrence, the anxiety and the joy of an unknown idiom,
The presentation, the phrase, occupies a rigid instant in time. This rigidity
means that there can be only one linkage, and one genre that engages the Is it
happening? and draws it toward a specific end. This temporal quality occasions an
agonistics upon the discursive surface. Genres of discourse compete for that limited
temporal instant that is occasioned by the phrase. It is at this point that we move from
that single phrase instant, and its relation to proper names and phrase regimens, to the
social, which consists of many instances, and an unlimited number of possible linkages.
For Lyotard this moment is crucial, it introduces the question of politics, for “to link is
necessary; how to link is contingent”.355 As such we may think of reality not as the
reality of the phrase, or the reality that the phrase presents, instead reality emerges in
the form of a question, “it is a state of the referent” within the phrase regimen, “which
results from the effectuation of establishment procedures”356 that draw the phrase into
meaning making chains. Such genres include: the economic, narrative, the
In the agitation of the phrase the demand for linkage arises, but the question of
linkage itself emerges in terms of a lack. Whilst there is an excess of possible linkages,
there is no ultimate guiding principle to direct this process. After all, as Lyotard insists,
there are no meaningful possibilities beyond the discursive surface. As such, one genre
of linkage engaging the phrase in meaning making chains necessarily suppresses every
other possibility of linkage. Everything about the phrase is at stake in the nature of the
linkage. The meaning of the phrase, its referent, signified, addressor, and addressee are
all determined by the nature of the linkage. The way in which phrases are linked,
considering the random and indeterminate phrase mass and unlimited number of
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possible ways to link, is thus a political question — to what end, and for whom are these
phrases linked? Questions of justice also reside at the point of linkage — what phrases
The differend thus disrupts the notion of justice as a rule or theory which
somehow transcends the contexts that they are applied to. Likewise the position of the
these assumed rights, what we have before us is the question of linkage. If we adhere to
the work of the phrase which arises in indeterminacy and reveals the lack that lies at the
heart of political judgement, then we must accept that politics resides firmly in the
domain of the reflective. Political judgement is thus not a determinant activity, since, as
Kant’s celebration of the revolution shows, there is no rule to govern this process
outside the process itself. The phrase by its very nature demands to be judged, but this
philosophical basis for affirmative judgement in the social domain. Such an affirmation
the assumption that all peoples can be subordinated to a universal law. To resort to a
the reflective character of the political, and with it the possibility of an affirmative
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inability to be sensitive to differences, to tolerate the incommensurable,358 silences all
that fails to find expression in the privileged genre. This silencing would be a wrong.
This is what a wrong [Tort] would be: a damage [dommage] accompanied by the
loss of means to prove the damage. This is the case if the victim is deprived of
life, or of all his of her liberties, or of the freedom to make his or her ideas or
opinions public, or simply of the right to testify to the damage, or even more
For Lyotard this injustice is constantly before us. He thus opens the door, via the
To give the differend its due is to institute new addressees, new addressors, new
significations, and new referents in order for the wrong to find an expression and
for the plaintiff to cease being a victim. This requires new rules for the formation
and linking of phrases. No one doubts that language is capable of admitting these
new phrase families or new genres of discourse. Every wrong ought to be able to
It is thus possible to find that affirmative moment in Lyotard: the call for a ‘new
competence’. We may understand this new competence in terms that have been set
that a judge worthy of the name has no true model to guide his judgements, and
that the true nature of the judge is to pronounce judgements, and therefore
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prescriptions, just so, without criteria. That is, after all, what Aristotle calls
Justice for Lyotard thus functions in terms of the ‘as if’ that lies at the heart of
reflective judgement in Kant, and is not an object of cognition. “To be just” Lyotard
continues, “is to act in such a way that ... the maxim of the will may serve as a principle
of universal legislation. But ... in such a way that ... it is not a condition that defines
justice”.362 The just judgement thus respects the radical indeterminacy that is attended
to upon the discursive surface, and does not attempt to legitimate itself as a practice by
privileging one genre, say the cognitive and its relation to descriptive phrases, over
others. The question of justice thus resides in the shadow of the problem of linking
phrases. The ‘as if’ does not precede judgement, or exist somehow outside it in order to
act as a motivating force, it occurs in the instant in which a judgement is called forth.
This means that Lyotard is attacking the liberal pluralist notion that the idea of
justice is the totality of all the things that can be said about it, or at least a set of
is that such rules privilege the cognitive genre, and exclude what can’t be phrased. For
Lyotard, on the other hand, we are always obligated to judge. This is thus not a
relativism, but is an obligation that functions only in terms of the failure of determinate
judgement to be able to deal with the event justly, and the subsequent necessity for
reflective judgement. The idea of justice itself is thus always to be determined, since it
is caught up in the sublime void that resides at its heart. The just judgement emerges in
Always conscious of the moment of its enunciation, the just judgement is never able to
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My aim in outlining Lyotard is to question the capacity of the phrase as event to
deliver an effective politics in the context of the discourse of the postcolonial. The
criteria for judging this capacity is threefold. In the first instance, I would wish to
juxtapose the political claims of Lyotard with Lyotard’s desire for the work. In
Lyotard’s lament concerning the avant-garde we can hear another agenda that cannot be
reduced to the logic of the event. What I am suggesting is that in such a lament there is
a something beyond the event, a forethought, a pedagogy perhaps, that exceeds and
disrupts the claims concerning the art event. Secondly, in light of Fanon’s staging of the
body as a disruptive site, the erasure of the body in Lyotard must be questioned. I
would suggest that there is an analytic of purity at work in Lyotard, an analytic that
seeks to find and privilege a pure instant to explain the social. It seems to me that this
desire to find a single critical moment, in order to explain what constitutes the social
critique, as I argued in chapters one and three, I would suggest that the sublime can no
longer be considered in the terms that Lyotard maintains. The discourse of the
from within. It is to push the sublime elsewhere, beyond the terms and the limits that
reason, in its Idealist incarnation, demands. It could be, therefore, that Lyotard’s
nexus that the French Revolution opened up, in order to foreground Lyotard’s desire to
redefine what constitutes politics and justice. In this critical endeavour the phrase is set
forth as a pure moment, and is thus granted the capacity to disrupt existing orders and
effect social change. Free from the contaminating influences of history, the phrase
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opens up the possibility, the necessity of invention within the domains of politics and
justice. I have staged such a possibility, despite Lyotard’s attempt to distance the work
from Idealist overtones, via the problem of consciousness that remained central to
Idealism’s critical task. I would argue that ultimately the pure void that lies at the core
of the phrase, as it attends to the “lack” that marks judgement, ultimately works to open
up a space for the reign of imaginative reason in human affairs. Here the self judges ‘as
But it seems to me that this redefinition of the political and the just, via the
demands that are attended to by the pure nature of the phrase, signals that the work itself
fails to function in the manner that the phrase sets forth. In this attempt to redefine we
find an interesting anomaly. Lyotard desires a pure site which is free from social
contamination. Yet the utilisation of such a pure site to critique existing structures of
thought must surely exceed the bounds of this purity. We could ask: why the historical
necessity for redefinition if the phrase by its very nature makes this demand? It thus
seems that whenever Lyotard considers the critical work of the differend he finds that it
demands a thought before, and of, the limits of the thought that the phrase marks. It is
contaminated with what it denies before it begins, namely the always already inscribed
nature of social being. Readers, spectators — Lyotard is one among them — are very
rarely, perhaps never open to the empty questioning — the ‘is it happening?’ — that
The Differend in its insistence upon the phrase seems to demand. Readers are
contaminated with the social and material structures that they inhabit, in which being is
negotiated: what does the work contribute to the history of thought? What impact does
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As such I have seized that moment in which “the lesser evil ought to be the
political good”,364 in order to read The Differend as an affirmative gesture. To bend the
work in this way, to highlight this aspect at the expense of others is not to open the work
up to the radical emptiness and indeterminacy that lies at the heart of the phrase. Rather
it reveals that readers always bring an agenda with them — the demands of the thesis,
events, the phrase, to precede the agendas that subjects bring to works as The Differend
implies. It is thus possible that in its preoccupation with denying causal structures, the
work merely asserts a pseudo-causality — the phrase precedes (temporally) the question
thus not sure that this reversing gesture on the part of Lyotard actually escapes the kind
Moreover, I would question the emptiness of the proper name in the context of
the work. Lyotard’s demand for pure and empty spaces upon which to stage the
such pure spaces be found? The proper name rather than being a rigid designator, an
empty signifier, like the phrase, is always already inscribed in the history of its
designation. Who names? For what purpose? On what conditions? The capacity to
name and to rename is itself a political process. To attend to the linkages upon the
proper name ‘Ayres Rock’ as if ‘Ayres Rock’ is an empty signifier is to miss the trace
of a history of colonisation, and it is also to miss the political nuances of changing the
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What is missed by the antidescriptivist idea of an external causal chain of
contingency of naming, the fact that naming itself retroactively constitutes its
What this means is that proper names are contaminated by the trace of the processes of
their production within the social. The retroactive ‘in it’ suggests that rather than a
causal chain that proceeds from emptiness to the necessity of linkage, as it is in Lyotard,
the proper name emerges as an afterthought, a necessity that arises in and through the
self’s location in a world of objects and ideas. This suggests that even at the point of
the proper name, that empty unit in Lyotard, we find political struggles that reveal that
The Differend does not go far enough in its critical work. It also suggests that the
indeterminate nature of the phrase as it attends to the proper name, and the question of
linkage are processes that are socially determined. Of course Lyotard would not deny
this, the point is that it is questionable, given this political struggle, whether the phrase
actually does open up the necessity for reflective judgement. Since the proper name
owes its existence to social processes — naming is inseparably linked to the issue of
authority: who has the authority to name? — it remains doubtful that the refusal to deal
with that history actually provides a basis for an affirmative justice. It is perhaps more
useful to deal with the site of the proper name’s production, its location in culture. As I
staged in this account in terms of the disruptive capacity of the random phrase. The
phrase exceeds the limits of history, it is not produced by history, it produces historical
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transformation constantly. Change is thus a necessary structural condition. The social
is marked in Idealist terms by the constant necessity to deal with indeterminacy, and
thinking, is thus always already marked by the demand for invention. I would contend,
however, that, whilst a certain Idealism remains at the edges of this thought — even
Fichte’s celebration concerning the demolition of the past and subsequent ‘clean slate’
from which to begin again, and perhaps again and again … — one must question this
structural condition. It has been staged in terms that bear a remarkable resemblance to
Idealism’s insistence upon the problems of conscious thought, the subjective rather than
underpin political fields such as the discourse of the postcolonial, we would find an
accent upon the social construction of subjects and the impact of this construction upon
conscious thought. It is in this sense that Fanon takes up the material body as a site
from which to construct a politics. As such, rather than invention, the discourse of the
(Bhabha and Rushdie) rather than foreground the necessity for a search for a rule, as
Lyotard would have it. I would contend that this important difference — negotiation as
opposed to invention — sets the postcolonial endeavour apart from critical strategies
that have been built upon an anxious Kantianism. If we are to engage in the discourse
of the postcolonial it seems to me that this critical difference is crucial and must be
opened up.
Perhaps the most telling blow to the critical usefulness of the idea of differend
can be found in The Differend’s final clause, which, like the phrase, emerges in the form
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The Is it happening? is invincible to every will to gain time. But the occurrence
doesn’t make a story, does it? — Indeed, it’s not a sign. But it is to be judged, all
the way through to its incomparability. You can’t make a political ‘program’ with
it, but you can bear witness to it. — And what if no one hears the testimony, etc.
gardist art, are merely misunderstood and rendered a sad and lonely political location.
differends, as the work urges, since differends themselves whilst everywhere present are
always already unpresentable. The problem is that this unpresentability means that
differends always require a thought, an ethic, a politics that lies beyond the terms of the
differend itself. As such the work seems to gesture toward, and rely upon a moment
lucid “The Fact of Blackness” can be staged. As I argued in chapter three, ‘blackness’,
black equates to what is bodily. In the context of Idealism, which seeks to establish the
authority of reasonable thought, this means that the black body demands to be sublated,
even expelled. But does Fanon’s resistance to this sublation take up the logic of
differend? Whilst it is the case that Lyotard rightly diagnoses the violence of Europe’s
production of its others, it is also the case that Fanon’s politics seizes that moment of
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politics is not concerned with overcoming political illegitimacy as differend. Rather, his
work takes up and subverts the illegitimacy into which he has been inscribed. The
body, that desiring machine that is always already antagonistic to Idealist thought, has
postcolonial is effected through a politics that can be described in the terms that Lyotard
Having charted what I consider to be the problem with Lyotard’s Kantian purity,
I would wish to re-turn to the postcolonial sublime through Homi Bhabha. After Fanon,
whose body seeks to inhabit and contaminate the structures of Hegel’s system, it is
temporal ethic that underscores Hegel’s articulation of Western progress and radically
Notes
299
See Lyotard’s “Lessons in Paganism”, in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 122-154.
300
See Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
301
Jean-François Lyotard, “Answer to the Question: What is the Postmodern?”, in The
Postmodern Explained to Children, ed. Julian Pefanis, Morgan Thomas (Sydney: Power
Publications, 1992), 23-24.
302
It could be pointed out that Lyotard’s rejection of the first Critique, in order to take
up the third, and as it turns out the second also, means that my claim here needs to be
qualified. I would suggest in response that the privileging of the third Critique over the
entire system can be read as an attempt to redeem the system. It seems to me that
Lyotard reads the third Critique as a logical conclusion to the divisions that are set up in
the first.
303
Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth
Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 53.
209
304
On this point I follow David Carroll, Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida
(London: Routledge, 1987), 173-184.
305
See Vijay Mishra, “Postcolonial Differend: Diasporic Narratives of Salman
Rushdie”, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 26, no. 3 (1995), 7-
45.
306
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Daniel
Breazeale (New York: Cornell University Press, 1988), 385.
307
G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 3, trans. E. S. Haldane
and Frances H. Simpson (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1955), 390.
308
G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover
Publications, 1956), 447.
309
Immanuel Kant, Conflict of Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Abaris
Books, 1979), 153.
310
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner
Press, 1951), 13.
311
Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 130.
312
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 97, 101.
313
Lyotard, The Differend, 124; Lyotard, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 75-76.
314
Carroll, Paraesthetics, 183.
315
I agree with Julian Pefanis (Heterology and the Postmodern, Sydney Allen and
Unwin, 1991) who locates Lyotard’s thought, along with Bataille and Baudrillard, in the
context of the changed circumstances of Eastern Europe in the 60’s, and consequent
need to reconstitute critical thought outside the givens and certainties of Marxism.
Pefanis argues that this critical turn was driven not by philosophical means, but by the
concrete historical conditions in the USSR at the time. Lyotard’s observation of the
party setting itself above the Marxist narrative of emancipation, and above the citizens
from whom they were legitimated, resulted in a loss of political faith, and search for a
politics and justice free from, what was understood as, totalitarian constraints. See also
Geoffrey Bennington’s, Lyotard Writing the Event (Manchester, Manchester University
Press, 1988), which argues that Lyotard’s break with Marxism involved two phases.
The first, a total break (drift) from the Socialisme ou barbarie group, and the second, a
(re)turn to ethical and political questions (1).
316
Jean-François Lyotard, “The Sublime and The Avant-Garde”, in The Inhuman, trans.
Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991),
90, 101.
317
Lyotard, “The Sublime and The Avant-Garde”, 102.
210
318
Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, 7.
319
Lyotard, “The Sublime and The Avant-Garde”, 93.
320
Lyotard, “Something Like Communication … Without Communication”, in The
Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1991), 108-118.
321
Lyotard, “The Sublime and The Avant-Garde”, 99-100.
322
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. J. Riviere (London: Hogarth,
1930), 78n.
323
Lyotard, “The Sublime and The Avant-Garde”, 93.
324
Lyotard, “The Sublime and The Avant-Garde”, 100, 101-102.
325
Bill Readings in Introducing Lyotard (London: Routledge, 1991) argues that “the
event is very close to the Derridean supplement” (57). I do not agree with this
formulation. Unlike the event which exceeds the trace of the social, the supplement is
always already contaminated. Derrida contends in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976) that the
supplement “harbors within it two significations which cohabitation is as strange as it is
necessary” (144). On the one hand the logic of the supplement is driven by the desire to
overcome the loss of a presence: Rousseau smells the scent of his absent lover upon the
pillow. But whilst the supplement “functions in her absence as a substitute for her
presence … even in her presence the supplement is at work” (152): Rousseau swallows
a lock of her hair whilst she dines with him. The supplement thus inhabits being in the
sense that the desired presence never actually arrives but is always already deferred
(159). As such the supplement is a logic that is built upon the human desire for the
complete connection between the self and the object of desire, in its various forms, but
this desire for presence can only emerge in terms of the absence of the desired object. It
is this ‘cohabitation’ that sets the logic of the supplement apart from the logic of the
event, since the event is marked not by the desire for something, a presence, but by
disruptions to the grounds for that desire itself. The event emerges not in terms of a
lack, but in terms which exceed. Whilst Derrida insists upon a never ending
supplementarity to substitute for an absence, Lyotard underscores the empty and
disruptive nature of the event.
326
See Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, ed. John. E. Jordon (Indianapolis:
The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965). He writes: poets “are not only the authors of
language and of music, of the dance and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they
are institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of
life, and the teachers who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true,
that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion”.
The imagination, Shelley argues, reveals the essential order of things. The conclusion
to A Defence of Poetry thus valorises poets as the mirrors of the “gigantic shadows [of]
futurity”, the “trumpets” that sing to battle, and the “influence which is moved not, but
moves”. Even though hardly anybody realises it, the influence of the poets is powerful
and pervasive; poets, Shelley would have us believe, “are the unacknowledged
211
legislators of the world” (31, 80).
327
Lyotard, “The Sublime and The Avant-Garde”, 105.
328
See Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformism
(London: Verso, 1989); and Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael
Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnestoa Press, 1984).
329
On this point I follow Horst Ruthrof, “Differend and Agonistics: a Transcendental
Argument”, Philosophy Today, vol. 34, no. 2 (1992), 324-335. He argues that the
theory of differend is incomplete. The absence of bodies, non-verbal sign systems !
the tactile, aural, proxemic, olfactory and visual ! in Lyotard’s privileging of the
linguistic as a model for the social “fails to account for a broad range of instances of
social injustice not accessible to a description based upon phrases” (333).
330
Lyotard, The Differend, xi.
331
Lyotard, The Differend, 56.
332
Lyotard, The Differend, 3-4.
333
Jean-François Lyotard, “The Differend”, in Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings
and Kevin Paul Geiman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 9-10.
334
Lyotard, The Differend, 171.
335
Jean-François Lyotard, “Answer to the Question: What is the Postmodern?”, 22.
336
Lyotard, The Differend, 4.
337
Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and “the jews”, trans. Andreas Michel and Mark
Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 47.
338
Lyotard, The Differend, xiii.
339
Lyotard, The Differend, 71.
340
Lyotard, The Differend, 70.
341
Lyotard, The Differend, 28.
342
Jean-François Lyotard, “Can Thought go on Without a Body?”, in The Inhuman,
trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1991), 9.
343
Lyotard, “Can Thought go on Without a Body?”, 23.
344
Lyotard, The Differend, 14.
345
Jean-François Lyotard, “Discussions, or Phrasing after Auschwitz”, in The Lyotard
Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 371.
212
346
Lyotard, The Differend, 79. See Charles Stivale’s, “Review” of The Differend, The
French Review, vol. 63, no. 4, (1990), 722-723, in which Lyotard’s notion of ‘the
phrase’, is defined as a fluid, strategic term, rather than a definitive one.
347
Lyotard, The Differend, 80.
348
Lyotard, “Discussions, or Phrasing after Auschwitz”, 371-372.
349
Lyotard, The Differend, 79.
350
Lyotard, The Differend, 29.
351
Lyotard, The Differend, 79.
352
See Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980)
353
Lyotard, The Differend, 47.
354
Lyotard, The Differend, 80.
355
Lyotard, The Differend, 29.
356
Lyotard, The Differend, 4.
357
Jean Francios Lyotard and J. Rogozinski, “The Notion of the Thought Police”, Art &
Text, no. 26 (1987), 29.
358
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 66.
359
Lyotard, The Differend, 5.
360
Lyotard, The Differend, 13.
361
Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming, 25-26.
362
Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming, 47.
363
See Seyla Benhabib’s suggestion in “Epistemologies of Postmodernism”, New
German Critique, no. 33 (1984), 103-127, that there is a contradiction in Lyotard’s
postmodern program. It seems that Lyotard is divided between advocating a plurality of
heterogeneous language games, and developing an epistemological viewpoint from
which he can attack grand narratives. Benhabib argues that Lyotard is unable to make
the choice. Whilst he champions a total move to the side of plurality and heterogeneity,
he deprives himself of a standpoint for critique. See also Stuart Sim’s, “Lyotard and the
Politics of Antifoundationalism”, Radical Philosophy, no. 44 (1986), 8-13.
364
Lyotard, The Differend, 140.
365
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 95.
213
366
Lyotard, The Differend, 181.
214
Chapter Five
Driven by the subaltern history of the margins of modernity — rather than by the
dynamism remains central in the postcolonial return to the colonial past. Next, in
taking hold of a bodily excess that refuses to be contained by Hegel’s systems. This
excess can be considered the postcolonial sublime. The sublime thus falls from its
noble frame in Kant to be taken up as a base, despised form. This shift from what could
be called the sacred to the profane marks the work of the postcolonial sublime. As an
ruptures, disruptions that alter the course of such impulses. Following this exploration
of the politics of excess in the context of the postcoloniality of Fanon, I then turned to
the work of Lyotard. I argued that Lyotard fails to account for the processes of reason.
The purity of the phrase event, its emptiness, is an inadequate description of the overfull
uncontainable excess, a too much that renders unifying teleologies untenable. Having
launched an attack upon Lyotard’s theory of differend, I would now wish to chart what I
would consider to be a more cogent political strategy for dealing with what I have called
the West’s increasing conservatism. Such a strategy can be found in the discourse of
disruptive impact upon the contemporary critical scene. It provides not only a challenge
to the idea of culture as monolithic, but also employs a profuse and controversial prose
which engages the reader in pushing the question of culture beyond the confines that the
teleology of reason demands. The text consists of fragments, ironies, and clusters that
are linked to various issues in order to provoke and disrupt, rather than instruct in the
pedagogic sense. As such we find conflicting discourses which remain open, refusing
The text implies a reader who must negotiate the shifting and contradictory structures of
occupy excessive spaces that are transgressive, pagan, and in the process of continuous
transformation.
the question of Bhabha’s conflictual discourse. I would suggest that much of the
controversy that surrounds this work can be related directly to this question. It has been
possible for some to read Bhabha, for instance, as a Marxist, others as an unabashed,
confrontations that are embedded in this body of work, and thus misses Bhabha’s
open form.
A possible model for the structure of The Location of Culture can be drawn from
the presence of independent and interdependent ‘voices’ within the novel. The voices in
this ‘dialogic’ relationship, as Bakhtin calls it, resist being subsumed and overruled by
an authorial totality. This is an aesthetic form that thus remains open. It works to
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promote productive possibilities, to promote debate, rather than insist upon a dominant
authorial voice which objectifies its characters, as in the case of monologic literary
forms.370 I would contend that Bhabha’s rhetoric draws upon a dialogic aesthetic form,
But what does this incompleteness mean in the context of a work whose
organising fiction is the location of culture? How does such a form figure in the
and diffuse architecture can be understood in terms of what I have called the
postcolonial sublime. For the discourse of the postcolonial, the sublime emerges as a
critical site upon which the authority of reason is written. To disrupt this conservative
authority it is necessary to unleash the sublime, its unpresentable excesses, from the
structures of conservative authority, in order to unleash an excess that disrupts the terms
of such authority.
terms of the question of excess and conflict. And secondly, I would wish to locate the
thesis intends, I will show how Bhabha seeks to disrupt the authority of reason by
unleashing the sublime. This disruptive politics takes up the conservative structures of
colonial authority, and exploits the vulnerability of such structures. I will begin this
study of Bhabha by drawing some productive parallels between his work and Fanon’s
names such as Lacan, and Derrida etc., I would wish to resist such a reading. Whilst I
217
poststructuralism,371 there is an attempt to deflect, to push elsewhere the terms of this
critique. As such I think Bhabha needs to be read alongside Lacan and Derrida as a
theorist attempting to come to terms with a specific moment within modernity, the
emergence of the capitalist West as oppressor. I would, therefore, in the terms that I
have drawn up in the thesis thus far, wish to situate Bhabha’s thought in a critical
relation to the Idealism of Hegel. I think that this relation is necessary, firstly because it
was Hegel, not Derrida or Adorno, who initially revealed how culture transforms itself
qua culture, via struggle, such that new cultural and artistic forms emerge. This is
crucial for Bhabha. And secondly because it does provide a useful metaphor for
thinking through the relationship between power, identity, and agency, as they appear in
Fanon, Hegel provides the terms for Bhabha’s critical work, and the terms for the
excesses and disruptions that are crucial in his elaboration of the location of culture.
In chapter three I argued that what Black Skin, White Masks effects in its
complex erasure of Hegel’s master and slave, is the notion that it is upon the black
body, in seizing that body that the struggle against colonial oppression begins.
opposing force, for as we have seen the black struggle has no political legitimacy in this
space. Instead such a struggle must be defined in relation to the dialectic, its rejected
location within and outside the system. It is from this space of rejection that Fanon’s
politics begins. Any voice that stirs in this space of the unspeakable, the unpresentable
Hegel sought to shore up Kantian reason, in a sense, to make its authority more robust
than the slippage in Kant’s architectonic system would allow, gaps, contradictions,
when these unpresentable spaces are seized in order to interrupt the totalising claims of
218
reason. Such a politics seeks to expose the fragility of reasonable systems. Located on
that muddy borderline that Kant grappled with, the discourse of the postcolonial goes to
work upon the limits of reason. It seeks to open up a space of questioning, defiance, a
space that attempts to push reason beyond the terms of its limits. In many respects the
discourse of the postcolonial wrests the sublime from its inscription in the drama of
reason’s processes, and puts it to disruptive use. To continually open up what reason’s
legislation and systematics exclude is to open up the sublime, to seize what is despised
politics. In Bhabha we find an elaboration of culture that utilises the metaphor of the
sublime. The sublime emerges in Bhabha as that material excess that reason fails to
contain. When opened up, this space of uncontainability effects a politics that cannot
the conservative sublime has its dialectic in Idealism. But in the discourse of the
postcolonial the sublime is that which exceeds dialectics. The cogency of the discourse
of the postcolonial can be staged precisely in terms of the overspill, the excess, that
defies the limits of dialectics. The Location of Culture begins with the essay “The
Bhabha rejects this critical propensity, and argues that there is no point in considering
there is always the possibility that the polarities in such a schema can become unequal,
and it is thus futile to resort to a politics which merely asserts, what Paul Gilroy has
In keeping with the notion that Bhabha seeks to open the sublime as sublime, his
work charts the material basis for asserting the inadequacies of dialectics. For Bhabha
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the nature of postcolonial identity resists the kinds of neat categorisation that
traditionally inhabit theories of culture. Displaced peoples, because they do not have
Home as a ready reference point, dwell in-between the conventional cultural categories,
such as East/West. Displaced peoples are forced to negotiate the divide between past
and present, East and West, North and South, First and Third. This temporality is
that politics emerges, and cultural change is made possible. I will take up the question
at present, is Bhabha’s emphasis upon cultural spaces that resist neat categorisation. It
is in this resistance to system that the postcolonial sublime emerges. I would thus wish
to begin by charting the outworking of this sublime in Bhabha. As the postcolonial self
resists neat categorisation, it is that which is left over, the excess that reason is unable to
contain that marks the moment of the postcolonial sublime. We can begin to chart the
in terms of the phenomenological relationship between time and space. I turn to this
issue in these terms, because it is this phenomenology that leads directly to the
privilege time over space in theorising consciousness. Kant for instance privileged time
over space in the imagination’s work upon the world of appearances.374 Hegel’s
measure for the progress of Geist, it is utilised to mark reason’s authority. This
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He seeks to interrupt the universal temporality that marks Hegel, with the notion that
space, cultural location, impacts upon consciousness. Bhabha attempts to open up the
cultural inscriptions that are hidden beneath the universal pretensions of Western
contaminated at every turn by its cultural location, the space of its formulation. Bhabha
Bhabha’s basic argument against the postmodern is that the postmodern critique
of modernity is inadequate because it fails to take its cultural location into account. We
could say that the postmodern replays the spatial blindness that I have suggested
inhabits Kant. In order to overcome different aspects of the modern, be it reason, the
postmodern, such as Lyotard, set forth, what Bhabha calls, an ‘ethics of self-
construction’.375 This is the notion that in order for the self to be truly free from the
contention here is not with reconstruction itself since his work basically repeats this
aim. Its interest lies in the question of the relationship between time and space in this
reconstruction, and the political effects of the assumptions that underpin it.
In order to outline what is at issue here, Bhabha goes to work upon Foucault.
The ‘Great Event’ of the French Revolution (in Foucault’s reading of Kant’s Was ist
a distance. Those in the midst of the action itself, ‘in the enunciative present’, could not
view the event as a spectacle, or interpret the event as a Sign in Foucault’s terms. Events
are made to mean in events that are outside, from the distance of perspective. Bhabha
in response to Foucault asks: whose is this space of distance? And points out that
Foucault’s perspective is nothing less than a Eurocentric one, since the ‘ontology of the
221
present’ is constructed in terms of making sense — ‘sense-as-synchronous’— from
European space. This means that this reading of the past excludes, and contains, any
rupture in this perspectival sense of meaning. Bhabha writes, what “if the ‘distance’
that constitutes the meaning of the ‘Revolution’ as sign, the signifying lag between
event and enunciation, stretches not across the Place de la Bastille or the rue des blancs-
of Kant on the revolution. It too lacks the spatial self-consciousness that Bhabha
evokes. As I have suggested, this is one the problems with Lyotard’s reading of the
Foucault, the practice of making time mean, and in this instance this means historical
event, is confined to a spatial perspective which assumes, for Bhabha, a continuity with
a European past. This practice leads Bhabha to make a statement that can be directly
cultural difference is revealed in his insistent spatializing of the time of modernity” (my
emphasis).379 The point is that Bhabha considers the postmodern emphasis upon the
constant reconstruction of the self to be confined to a certain cultural and social space.
perspectives, those that do not assume a spatial continuity with historical events in the
The critique of the postmodern that is offered here can be understood in terms of
Weber’s contention concerning the time of capitalism. The use of this term has been set
forth in Terry Maley’s useful reading of Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
222
Both Marx’s Promethean hero and Weber’s own were ... rendered anachronistic
that the nineteenth century had inherited from the Enlightenment were being
chronometric time.381
rationalization of the modern world in general.” By the end of the nineteenth century, a
capitalist formulation of time emerged and demolished (what is for Weber the more
progressive time (Condorcet, Comte, J.S. Mill)”. The effect of this is “a certain
of more”.382
But for Bhabha it is not simply an ‘instrumental rationality’ that is at issue here.
interpreting the past from a distance, is the condition that frees subjects from the
constraints of the modern propensity to totalise, how, Bhabha writes, “do we specify the
is, and here Bhabha parts company with Weber, that the constant fracturing of the
time as it is privileged in Idealism. For Weber the loss of synchronicity was lamented
for its dehumanising effects. Hence we find Hegel among the few who offer a more
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“humane” conception of time. The capitalist subject is caught in the trap of an endless,
directionless time, and consequently human potential, namely the capacity to be free
from dogmatic rationality, is lost. The time that Bhabha seems to have in mind here,
the idea of progress, as we have seen in Hegel, and differentiates the past from the
present, such that categories such as the modern and the primitive arise.384 Continuous
time has enabled the West to think itself legitimate and authentic, an identity worthy of
progression outright, the point, however, is that the meaning of the past is still
what I have called the excesses of the postcolonial. Two points need to be stressed here.
The first is that modernity is understood in terms of the Enlightenment ideal of the
rational free ‘man’, the discourse in which “the figure of the ‘human’ comes to be
authorized”. The second relates to the first. Modernity is the consensual march of
temporal notion, one that differentiates the past from the present and future, and which
legitimates or delegitimates culture and society. These two moments converge in Tony
Spybey’s description of Europe’s capitalist expansion. I note the crucial link between
The success of the European states in setting up their colonial empires gave the
Europeans a tremendous sense of their own superiority. This coincided with the
limits to the frontiers, abstract or physical, that Europeans could push back. The
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fusion of a culture of rationality with political and economic power created the
positivistic world-view.385
philosophical reason for the discourse of the postcolonial begins to emerge. In the
dominant, there seems to be a disregard for the possibility of other spaces. The
disregard for otherness is constructed in terms, as Simon During so aptly puts it, “which
more or less intentionally wipe out the possibility of post-colonial identity. Indeed ...
argument which attempts to show that ‘we’ now live in postmodernity”.386 The
postmodern thus reads much like reason’s processes: it is not immune to making
universal claims, and it produces cultural spaces that are unable to be subordinated to
the terms of its critique of modernity. I would suggest that what Bhabha seizes in his
critique of the postmodern, are these spaces that exceed the scope and terms of the
postmodern. As this chapter begins, we may gesture toward defining the discourse of
the postcolonial as that which is left over when the postmodern reaches its limits. It is
with this sense of the spatial limits of the postmodern in mind that I would wish to
outline Bhabha’s postcolonial time. In keeping with the aim of the thesis, I will draw
disrupting force, a critical temporality that interrupt’s the hegemony of Western reason.
Bhabha launches an alternative conception of space, time, and politics via Frantz
Fanon’s “sense of the belatedness of the black man”.387 This recalls the
be said that Bhabha’s reading of Fanon appears to remain selective and therefore
225
contentious, since it departs from Fanon’s more existential and Marxist moments. For
charge, that Bhabha’s use of Fanon in this fashion is one which refuses to reduce his
ouvre to a singular whole, and attempts to present some of the more dissenting
three takes up such a reading strategy, though I put it to use in areas that Bhabha passes
over. The outcome, however, remains consistent with Bhabha. Fanon’s unsettled
Hegelianism attempts to open up, what he calls (with a different object in mind),
accompanied the European sense of superiority: “But of course, come in, sir, there is no
colour prejudice among us. ... Quite, the Negro is a man like ourselves. ... It is not
because he is black that he is less intelligent than we”.389 This attempts to reveal a
discontinuous temporal gap between the white world of the coloniser, and the black
world of the colonised desire to be like the white man. The gap reveals that the black
world, despite its desire, arrives too late, it is always one step behind in the myth of
progression that sustains the Western sense of superiority. We can understand this
grammatology: “Le nègre n’est pas. Pas plus que le Blanc”.390 This in-between
grammatical moment (the full stop) exemplifies, in Bhabha’s scheme, the time of
space. Fanon’s choice to use a full stop in this instance functions temporally rather than
spatially as the work’s title suggests. The full stop marks the end of the first clause, and
the gap, break, interruption, between the first and the second. The choice not to use an
226
exclamation mark, or a question mark (which, apart from the full stop, are the only
conventional ways to end French and English sentences), also means that one clause is
not emphasised over the other. The distinction that emerges is thus a temporal one.
Two clauses emerge in the space upon the page, but the relationship between them is
temporal. One asserts itself in front of the other. The ‘location of culture’, as a
‘location’ is a spatial term. Fanon’s formulation thus becomes the sign of the ‘time-lag
of cultural difference’. The full stop marks a break, a temporal gap between black and
white, and this becomes the site which makes a politics of resistance possible, or as
Bhabha writes:
deformative structure that does not simply revalue the contents of a cultural
enunciative site, through that temporal split — or time lag — that I have opened
If the colonised arrives too late in the myth of progression, then there is a sense in which
the colonised speaks from Europe’s past. If a linear relationship between the past and
the present is the legitimating strategy of modernity, then it is possible, if this past is
occupied in some sense, to disrupt the present. Because the colonised occupies this past
227
this space of ‘belatedness’, in what has been left behind. Such a ‘belatedness’ when
seized in terms of the logic of the colonial, effectively disrupts colonial time. Cultural
struggle is a temporal notion in this scheme, it emerges in the temporal gap between
coloniser and colonised in order to produce sites of the elsewhere, or the ‘hybrid’ as
colonial. Like the question of exile that Gordon Bennett’s Painting for a New Republic
(The Inland Sea) opens up — where am I? (as I discussed in chapter two) — Bhabha
inserts (an)other time into the space of the colonial nation. This is a strategy that seeks
to disrupt what I have called the process of reason, the task of Western philosophy to
produce an authoritative account of reason. In the temporal gap between the coloniser
and colonised, the possibility of contesting this task is opened up. This gap can be
described as the location of cultural agency. The ‘time lag’ evokes an indeterminacy, an
way history can be made to mean. In the context of Hegel’s thought, such struggle
disturbs the capacity of reasonable systems. Thus rather then privilege time over space,
marginalisation.
From “the shifting margins of cultural displacement”,394 Bhabha writes, from the
perspective of peoples who do not have a ‘cultural reference point that is readily
concerning identity, agency, power and politics, and community emerge. This difficult
cultural location can be understood in terms of the sublime. It is a space of excess, a too
late, that does not fit into totalising cultural forms, the stability of Western dialectics.
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that is ‘located’ in time in-between fixed categories, a place of hybridity, a space of
translation, a place in which a new political object emerges being ‘neither one nor the
displacement and disjunction ... does not totalize experience”.395 Postcolonial identity is
thus unable to be defined in terms of a unified ‘essence’. It seems that the postcolonial
exists in a groundless and indeterminate space, which, from the perspective of the
Rather than being cause for lament for Bhabha, the groundless ‘location’ of the
postcolonial is celebrated as a space that disrupts and alters the destination of the
takes up Moraru’s parallel model of the relationship between the West and its other.
Moraru contends that this relationship can be staged as oblique and politically
the colonisers and their relation to the colonies and former colonies through metaphors
along with Moraru, who explains that the ‘Orientalising of Europe’ has been staged ‘on
different scales and with varying political bearings’, that the possibility of this
disturbing threat to the authority of the colonial. Such disturbances are less antagonistic
excesses that disrupt the structural terms of that authority. In this regard, Bhabha’s
through the myth of nationalist unity, contends not just with the structural necessities of
self-consciousness, but also with the possibility of a disturbance to that structure. The
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‘Orientalisation of Europe’ can thus be understood as an instance in which the
postcolonial sublime takes effect. It will be useful to turn to some of the key critical
terms that Bhabha employs in order to explain the critical task of the postcolonial in-
Bhabha’s Infrastructures
Bhabha undertakes the task of opening up the space of what I have called the
Morrison, Gordimer, Walcott, Rushdie, and Conrad, archival documents from the
Indian Mutiny, Third World Cinema, and nineteenth century colonial history. Several
key terms are set forth in order to open up a disruptive postcoloniality within colonial
discourse. In chapter one I suggested that the discourse of the postcolonial is grounded
in the notion that the nationalism of ‘third world’ liberation movements effectively
delivered the former colonies back into the hands of the old colonial powers (Chatterjee,
Davidson, Dirks). The term ‘postcolonial’ thus directly relates to colonialism, and
suggests that colonial power has not diminished but has merely shifted its structure of
takes up the postcolonial to prise open the question of culture, there does not seem to be
a great deal of discrimination between texts that obviously occupy the height of
colonialism and texts that have emerged after colonialism. This lack of discrimination
implies, as I have suggested, that the political, economic, and cultural world is still
indelibly marked by subtle and not so subtle structures of colonial power. It seems that
for Bhabha, and the discourse of the postcolonial in general, the term ‘postcolonial’
marks the necessity of (re)turning to the primal scene of colonial domination in order to
articulate a politics for today. If reason is compelled to repeat the possibility of its
collapse (the conservative sublime) in order to establish its authority, the discourse of
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the postcolonial compulsively returns to the terror of colonialism to find a ground for a
contemporary politics.
At the core of such a pessimistic assumption there is the stark reality of the failure of
continues to be preoccupied with myths of national unity, the polyglot nature of the
contemporary world remains, in the formulations that mark this thesis, the object of
politics that leads us to what I have called Bhabha’s infrastructures. In this (re)turn to
the primal scene of colonial domination Bhabha’s infrastructures set forth the grounds
insistence upon symbols of oneness, and the political consequences of oneness, with a
discourse of excess. In the context of this thesis, this insistence upon excessive and
disruptive sites means that the sublime can never be as contained as the pundits of a
some of which have become the standard critical terms for postcolonial criticism.396
Among these, mimicry, sly civility, subaltern agency, hybridity, the third space of
enunciation, and culture as a strategy of survival, have emerged as the most pivotal. I
shall outline the key features of each term, and subsequently make some connections to
the vulnerable structure of the colonial that I have suggested is at the core of Bhabha’s
work. My aim is to examine the staging of the location of culture. I shall begin this
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colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a
difference that is almost the same, but not quite … the discourse of mimicry is
Whilst ‘mimicry’ in this formulation is set forth in the language of Freud (fantasy) and
of colonial reason into play. I would contend that ultimately the political possibilities
that Bhabha seeks to open up come to the fore only in and through disruptions to
Hegelian systemisation. Lacan and Freud function in this context precisely as sites from
thought in the context of Europe’s colonial expansion, and, therefore, for the discourse
of the postcolonial, with its emphasis upon conflict, liberation, becomes apparent in
Hegel’s reworking of the Kantian sublime. Hegel’s theory of the self is drawn up
around one basic problematic. Proceeding from the assumption that Absolute Spirit
(unity) is greater than the individual self, it becomes the task of the self to overcome the
unknown darkness within, in order to be at one with the Absolute. Whilst Kant argued
that the Absolute perspective is impossible, and remained content to locate reason’s
dynamism in relation to reason’s dark side, for Hegel the absolute perspective is as
progressive movement of human consciousness from darkness to light, from the obscure
interesting turn. As the colonial draws his subject into a narcissistic structure of
identification, to make them ‘the same’, to draw ‘them’ into the light of reason, a gap
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between the possibility of that sameness and its impossibility, ‘but not quite’, appears.
This gap emerges as a necessary part of the colonial game. As Hegel reveals,
possession demands its object continuously, but such a demand is necessitated on the
basis of the object always remaining an object. The demand for mimicry by the
coloniser thus reveals a major pitfall that disrupts the grounds for colonial authority.
that is at once a menacing camouflage (Lacan), and, in the language of Freud (on the
a form of colonial discourse that is uttered inter dicta: a discourse at the crossroads of
what is known and permissible and that which though known must be kept
of mimicry … does not merely ‘rupture’ the discourse [of the colonial], but becomes
presence”.399 The colonial subject thus ‘resembles’ the colonial, yet at the same time
becomes a ‘menace’, as Bhabha puts it, since this resemblance can never be complete.
This means that colonial authority is never a totalising discourse, there remains a
subjectivity that exceeds the limits of that authority. The subject of mimicry, a subject
of the ‘knowing’ colonial, the subject made visible by the cognitive powers of
Enlightenment, remains in many ways hidden and not known, beyond the authority of
reason. That hidden moment within mimicry, the unpresentable, is thus a political
disruption only insofar as it opens up the possibility of the question within the discourse
of colonial mastery, and with it the possibility of changing the terms of that colonial
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imposition. Mimicry is a menace precisely because it unleashes a hidden space within
The civil discourse — sly civility — of the colonial also struggles in the face of
the civil address and its colonial signification — each axis displaying a problem
of the master-slave for where discourse is so disseminated can there ever be the
self.400
What is at issue here, once again, is the attempt to disrupt the process of reason. If
Fanon celebrated and unleashed what reason attempts to subdue — the body — Bhabha
seeks the disturbing hidden spaces within reason’s processes to disrupt the terms of its
authority. Hegel’s model provides the grounds for the colonial encounter, it
characterises colonial desire initially — to systematise — but at the same time must be
effaced, for the encounter with the other resists this possibility. The imposition of
authority is thus less the smooth drawing together of disparate elements, than a process
of splitting. The colonial is caught between its desire to make concrete its abstract
thought, and, what could be considered, the actual discursive encounter. In the case of
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miscognition, rather than the recognition that can be found in Hegel’s
phenomenological model. Again the accent upon miscognition produces a subject that
disrupts the dialectic of unconcealment. In similar fashion to the ideas that cluster
around mimicry, we find the colonial desire for repetition, and the problem that the
demand for repetition produces: it never produces the same but the difference of the
same.
Subaltern agency is also staged in terms of a slippage that works against the
This emphasis on the disjunctive present of utterance enables the historian to get
dialectical sublation nor the empty signifier: there is a contestation of the given
the social ordering of symbols is challenged within its own terms, but the grounds
those terms.401
engagement in thought concerning colonialism. The contact between the coloniser and
the colonised is theorised in the temporal and spatial terms that Bhabha opens up in his
critique of the postmodern. The moment of the event of communication, the now of
terms than an overdetermined site, marked by both the structures of colonial desire and
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the desire of the objects of colonial desire. What is at issue in the space of the now of
colonialism, for Bhabha, is the meaning of signs, and the possibilities that the
relationship between speech and writing here. Derrida points out that Plato’s mistrust of
presupposes the absence of the author’s authority over the communicative event, and is
deemed a threat to the interests of morality and truth, is, paradoxically, condemned itself
to be written in the interests of the same. Writing is thus constituted in terms of the
logic of the Pharmakon: it is both a remedy that is able to counteract the deficiencies of
speech, and a poison, since it operates in terms of the absence of authority. Derrida
attempts to disrupt the assumption of Western philosophy that constitutes itself in terms
of speech, but which must always be condemned to writing. We could say that Bhabha
takes up this logic in his analysis of colonial acts. Colonial desire, for Bhabha, cannot
operate solely in terms of the spatial demands of speech. Like Plato’s mistrust of
writing, colonial desire demands a wide dissemination that calls upon the discursive to
supplement the spatial drawback of speech. This means that colonial logic, like
Western philosophy, is inscribed in the logic of the pharmakon. Derrida writes, “the
opposed, the movement and play by which each relates back to the other, reverses itself
and passes into the other … The pharmakon is the movement, the locus, and the play
Bhabha champions this play between texts and their colonial authors. The
movement, rupture, and disjunctions that are inscribed in the logic of the pharmakon
open up the possibility for contesting the meaning of colonial signs. In fact we could go
a step further and say that it is not the possibility of contestation that is what is at issue
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here, it is that contestation itself is a structural necessity. Indeed as Lord Alfred
What struck the imagination of Britain during the height of its colonial reign was a stark
awareness of Britain as an Island with a relatively small population. We are ‘one isle’,
the poet repeats, yet masters of a vast empire. The issue of maintaining such a vastness,
mind. The uniting of the plethora of differences under one flag was as an immense task.
To achieve a sense of unity across such a vast space would indeed be a great
accomplishment. Just as Idealism established the authority of reason via its capacity to
bring a unity to bear upon the manifold (Kant), to unite disparate elements (Hegel), the
But was the Empire ever unified? Or was it always haunted at its edges by the
nagging thought that ultimately this robust image of unity was extremely costly
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The rulers of Great Britain have, for more than a century past, amused the people
with the imagination that they possessed a great empire on the west side of the
Atlantic. This empire, however, has hitherto existed in imagination only. It has
hitherto been, not an empire, but the project of an empire; not a gold mine, but the
project of a gold mine; a project which has cost, which continues to cost, and
which, if pursued in the same way as it has been hitherto, is likely to cost,
concern for profitability. The empire for Smith was clearly in process, as his repeated
insistence upon the term “project” suggests. His acute economic analysis reveals the
disjunction between colonial desire and its actuality in the space and time of the
desire that was forced to face the complicated and irreconcilable demands of
colonialism.
authority is haunted by the logic of the pharmakon. Colonial authority thus can never
arrive in terms of the demands of colonial desire. There are uncontainable sites that
disrupt the desire to subsume the object under the ruling principles of reason. In
practice the colonial was very rarely reasonable. Perhaps the most stark instance of this
emphasis upon the impossibility of a dominant cultural sign, can be found in Bhabha’s
notion of hybridity:
that would suggest that the originary is, really, only an ‘effect’. Hybridity has no
such perspective of depth or truth to provide: it is not a third term that resolves the
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tension between two cultures, or the two scenes of the book, in a dialectical play
of ‘recognition’. The displacement from symbol to sign creates a crisis for any
doubly inscribed, does not produce a mirror where the self apprehends itself; it is
always the split screen of the self and its doubling, the hybrid.405
Hybridity is set forth in terms of a crisis in the process of reason. Again we find
colonial subject as the mirror of the colonial, can never reflect back the kind of
recognition that the coloniser demands. There is a rupture, a disjunction in the process,
which means that authority can never be unified. In order to maintain mastery the
colonial, as a structural necessity, must disavow unity. Mastery can never be a fixed
upon fixed traditions of knowledge, but, like the capitalist logic in which it is
embedded, must efface those traditions in order to take up new ones in the struggle for
mastery. The colonial encounter produces sites which cannot be reduced to the terms of
that encounter. New spaces are produced which disrupt and force the processes of
Of the mobile army of figures deployed in order to articulate the politics of the
postcolonial, ‘hybridity’ perhaps emerges as the most pivotal,406 at least in the context
of Bhabha’s critical reception. The example outlined in The Location of Culture is that
of the Hindu response to the message of Christian missionaries in India.407 It seems that
Hindus resisted Christianity not through a straight out rejection of the Christian message
will convert’. Bhabha notes that this construction ! the vegetarian Bible ! is not
prefigured in the Hindu/Christian dialectic, but goes beyond it. The construction of a
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‘hybrid’ object by Hindus in this instance, functions as a sign of resistance that cannot
Christian missionary is frustrated by the emergence of the hybrid, and must redefine, re-
evaluate, and change, in order to maintain status as the teacher of the faith. Hybridity
nuances relate to the issue of spatial displacement and its effect upon the time of culture,
and identity that I have outlined. Hybridity is the moment in which colonial desire is
limits that have been marked by the colonial. In the now of colonial pedagogy, colonial
desire is thus less the total imposition of a predictable, monolithic cultural unity upon an
otherwise empty native signifier, than a frantic attempt to ‘pin down’ the meanings that
the native other subverts. The grounds for the certitude of the colonial are
cultural signs ultimately means that colonial desire can never be fully present to itself.
When this desire is employed in the dissemination of the sign of cultural unity, it suffers
a kind of violence. For the coloniser the sign bears the trace of the colonial ! its
materiality means that it is recognisable (the Bible as a sacred text) ! but to the
colonised the colonial sign is understood in terms of a different cultural sign system.
The colonial sign is thus subverted, structurally disrupted by the native: the Bible is a
sacred text, but its sacredness is dependent upon … . This process of doubling can be
understood in terms of the politics of excess that is the subject of this thesis. The
production of a hybrid site that exceeds the limits of colonial desire disempowers the
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colonial as it empowers the native. The coloniser recognises the structural limitations of
its desire and, in order to maintain the authoritative hand, transforms what is otherwise
considered to be his unitary cultural discourse. The colonial process thus gives rise to
hybridity for both the coloniser, in the act of self negation that is necessary for the
practice of domination, and the colonised, in resisting the coloniser. As can be seen, the
political site for this process is never fixed and unitary, the simple conflict of a unified
master and slave. Such a site is in flux, always already in a state of emergency as the
hybrid as sublime excess emerges to alter the destination of the coloniser and the
colonised relationship.
temporal and spatial terms. The now of colonial encounter, its location in space and
time, is set against the abstract teleology of reason. There is an important distinction
between the abstract and the actual, between reason’s teleology and actual colonial
important to note that the now of colonial encounter, as I have outlined, cannot be
confrontation, a conflict concerning reason’s fort/da, unlike the event which functions
as a moment in itself. The excesses that the space of the now can be considered
in the political nuances that can be drawn up around excess. Rather than a moment of
postcolonial excess can be considered a residue that is left over after the encounter, after
It is in this temporal space that the confrontation of the coloniser and colonised
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concerning the authority of dominant cultural signs. As I have suggested, there is a
sense in which colonial desire is inhabited by the logic of the pharmakon. The
dissemination of the abstract colonial sign of unity does not seem to be able to arrive at
its colonial destination as a self-presence. To use the well worn distinction between the
motivated and purposeful nature of the symbol and the arbitrary sign, the abstract
The possibilities of the sign exceeds the intentions of the symbolic forms of authors.
The disjunction between authors and signs in the temporal and spatial singularity of the
colonial moment becomes the site for transgression on the part of the colonised subject.
cultural unity.
I would suggest, and I will deal with this in a moment, that the discursive space
desires. But one would wonder, and Bhabha doesn’t really deal with this, why the space
of the now, as a space concerning the sign/symbol of unity, is privileged in the colonial
encounter over the notion that colonialism itself, whilst it does operate discursively, is
also a spatial imposition? I have suggested that Bhabha’s emphasis upon the complex
relation of the temporal and the spatial is drawn from one of Derrida’s infrastructures,
the pharmakon, but this doesn’t ultimately deal with the problem of spatial imposition.
The modern colonial built jails, railroads, power stations, and schools, and established
plantations. The process of colonial modernity was a very physical one. It designed
buildings, introduced machines, and built infrastructures that changed the landscape and
building of a church in a native village as a discursive act, but to suggest that a church
building is nothing but a discursive act, as Bhabha seems to, is to overlook the
physicality of buildings, and the impact they have upon bodies, feelings, and the
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libidinal drives. If this is the case then the question of resistance cannot be reduced to
the working out of a discursive desire. Resistance must involve a physical dimension.
requires much more than a struggle concerning the sign of unity. It also involves taking
hold of the infrastructures that are built around the institution in order to effect social
phrase from Manuel Castells, based upon the notion that “space is not a ‘reflection of
society’, it is society”,410 would open up possibilities for the questions of agency and
resistance that Bhabha doesn’t engage in. This renders Bhabha’s propensity for the
than simply detailing what took place in the history of colonialism. I would argue that
his work lends itself to a contemporary politics in which the discursive is paramount to
any politics. What is pointed in Bhabha’s ‘discursive turn’, as opposed to the Lyotard
of The Differend, is the struggle of desire that animates the discursive. I will attend to
desire, I would contend, contra Benita Parry, that this discursive and temporal staging of
the colonial encounter depends upon, rather than excludes, the dialectic of colonial
domination. Parry argues that the groundlessness that is implied in the privileging of
the discursive does not empower the native and give cause to resistance. Writing from a
Marxist vantage point, she argues that Bhabha has been seduced by a poststructuralist
upon mobilising “the language model to explain colonialism’s past social processes and
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Moreover the utilisation of ‘hybridity’ as a conceptual term to undermine colonialism’s
pretension to order — by disrupting the system of oppositions that make this order
between the coloniser and colonised, and thus the reality of colonial oppression. The
crux of the matter is that an agonistic strategy implies that the coloniser and colonised
do not inhabit a dialectic of domination. For Parry, Bhabha has subsumed the
subordinates human experience to language, and which does not engage in the material
base. This means that instead of approaching the question of colonialism as the hostile
struggle between two opposing, ‘antagonistic’ forces, in which the distribution of power
is not equal, Bhabha stages the coloniser and the colonised relationship as a competition
upon a level playing field for the appropriation of cultural symbols. For Parry this
cultural difference is translated “in the third space of enunciation, where it is reiterated
differently from its prior context”412 — sets him apart from the more general, and
useful, use of the term by Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall, among others, as denoting
For my purposes two things are at issue here. The first concerns the claim that
stages the question of resistance in terms which demand the abolition of the antagonism
conceptual error in Parry’s engagement in Bhabha’s work. Her argument conflates the
now of colonial encounter with the abstract, in a way that is not consistent with
Bhabha’s text. She fails to consider Bhabha’s textualism in terms of the relationship
between desire and the processes of signification. This means the argument, whilst it
does point towards the limits of pure textualism, misses what is at stake in this attempt
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to relocate the question of culture. If Lyotard and Foucault were interested in the
meaning of the revolution from a distance, as I have outlined, Bhabha is concerned with
the event from the space of the revolution itself. But this insistence upon the now of the
event is not to take up the postmodern preoccupation with the local, as Parry implies.
The now of colonial encounter in Bhabha, is excessive and disruptive precisely because
it can be located in relation to global economic and cultural discourses. In Bhabha the
local emerges as less a site in itself, which somehow disrupts metanarratives, than a site
of inscription. In the colonial context, what Bhabha opens up is what happens when the
contestation can be characterised as singular events that render the space of domination
as uncertain. This temporal and spatial emphasis aims at dealing with colonial acts in
terms of the instant in which they take place. I have suggested that, because of this
singularity, these are terms that attempt to resist a pretension to abstraction. Bhabha
does, however, set this process of contestation forth in abstract terms. This is the
function of the much used term, the ‘third space of enunciation’. This term provides an
emerges in the context of discursive disruption, and also of Bhabha’s critical position on
the question of contemporary culture. Here the figure of the migrant comes to the fore.
disruptions to colonial discourse, the third space builds upon these insights and marks
the disturbing figure of the migrant for the Western nation. He writes:
discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of
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culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be
The third space is set forth as a kind transcendental condition (Kant). It is the structural
space that characterises the overlap in intercultural encounter. It is a space which is set
forth under the demands of consensus, assimilation, but which ultimately is unable to
deliver, and leads to conflict and excess. In itself it is ‘unrepresentable’, it does not
precede the actual encounter itself. As such the third space seems to be both inside and
outside the discursive. It seems to function as an alterity within the communicative act,
translation on the part of the desiring subject. Intercultural encounter is marked by the
Bhabha does not develop the use of the term fully. But it seems to open up an
idea of desire and its role in the processes of signification in a way which underscores
the textual disjunctions of the colonial encounter and migrancy, and which enables
perspective of the colonised/migrant. The third space works against both the
“primordial unity” and “the notion of fixity”, expressed in the desire of the Western
national unity, can be seen to be productive for the migrant and disruptive to the nation-
state. Clearly Bhabha in abstraction seeks a term in order to stage an alternative desire,
one which confronts the desire of the conservative nation-state. I say this because his
work is littered with telling phrases such as, “the everyday existence of the Western
metropolis”, and “Maggie Torture’s Britain” (Rushdie), that are opposed to the
This means that the third space is marked as transgressive (the subversion of the object
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of the referent for its own ends). The location of an excessive cultural space, the
scandalous ‘third space’, contests both the discourses of cultural relativism and its
I would suggest that what Bhabha opens up is the question of the unpresentable,
the disturbing sublime. In this context, with its excesses and contaminations, the
unpresentable remains to haunt the myth of unity, it refuses to be drawn into its order.
totalising discourse. If Lyotard found the impossibility of the analytic of the sublime to
be drawn into Kant’s architectonic system as the marker of the unpresentable, for
postcolonial sublime is that cultural excess that refuses to be drawn into the teleology of
The third space is animated by a linguistic theory: Walter Benjamin’s “The Task
language, and the impossibility of fixity in translation that can be drawn into what I
“would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original. For in
its afterlife — which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a
the fluidity of the original implies the necessity of translation, “the language of a
translation” must find a logic of its own, it must “let itself go, so that it gives voice to
the intentio of the original not as reproduction but as harmony, as a supplement to the
language in which it expresses itself, as its own kind of intentio”.415 Translation thus is
not constituted as the (re)production of the original literally, its subject matter, as if the
original is a pure site that is somehow cut off from the translation’s impurity. The
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reproduction is part of what is already integral to the life of the original, its poetic
What does a literary work say when what it says it not what it says? This is
Benjamin’s point of departure: “In all language and linguistic creations there remains in
case of the literary, if such a thing exists, the literal translation can be totally inadequate.
the original — as a metaphor for the postcolonial migrant. Thus whilst Benjamin
disrupts translation as information, as telling those who don’t understand what the work
says what the work says,417 Bhabha insists that migrant culture is marked by the
impossibility of translating that what. But what is untranslatable here? I would suggest,
to pursue Benjamin as Bhabha insists, that what is at issue is less the possibility of the
translation of cultural essence, the pure original, than the notion that the translated is
The higher the level of a work, the more does it remain translatable even if its
any inherent difficulty, but because of the looseness with which meaning
attaches to them.418
It is thus the defiance of the possibility of the original, of a cultural essence, that renders
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transmissal of subject-matter’”.419 The impossibility of such a transmissal is
scandalously disruptive to any notion of culture that would pretend to the progress of
the discourses of cultural purity. Such an excess can be understood as that which is
sublime, that which defies the order the cognition when cognition is the order of the
day.
The sublime that emerges in Bhabha thus cannot be understood in the romantic
terms of Lyotard. What Lyotard’s reading of the sublime lacks is an account of the
sublime in reason’s teleology. Such a process, however, is crucial for Bhabha. The
struggle is best theorised in terms of the ‘now’ of the colonial encounter, the ‘third
writes:
The language of critique is effective not because it keeps forever separate the
terms of the master and the slave, the mercantilist and the Marxist, but to the
construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other,
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properly alienates our political expectations, and changes, as it must, the very
as Bhabha calls it, the passage of reason, in order to open up sites that exceed the terms
political metaphor departs from the postmodern purity of Lyotard. If the contenders in
any conflictual relation are never unitary in themselves, their interaction has the
possibility of always setting up other political sites in which the ratio of power is
infrastructures effectively seek to lay hold of the sublime, in order to undertake the
disruptive work that emerges as a necessity in the discourse of the postcolonial. Where
colonial desire is reason’s authoritative processes, for the discourse of the postcolonial
the sublime is the material real, that which is unable to be contained. The
infrastructures, mimicry, sly civility, subaltern agency, hybridity, all open up spaces of
excess in order to disturb the authority of the colonial. As such the postcolonial sublime
emerges from the dark spaces within reason’s processes. In colonial terms, Bhabha’s
infrastructures arise as an obligation, but quickly exceed the terms of such an obligation.
If in Fanon the disruptive capacity of excess is unleashed through the black body, in
Bhabha a disruptive untranslatable excess emerges in the colonial demands upon the
native. In each the teleology of Western reason is interrupted by a sublime that is less a
noble pursuit (Kant) than the sublime that contaminates. Such is the sublime of the
despised.
I have also contended that Bhabha takes what I have called a politics of the
nation-state. Here the figure of the postcolonial migrant (re)enters what is essentially a
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colonial relation. As Anderson in his article “Exodus” laments, such a (re)entering
disturbs the sustainability of the unifying myth of nation (as I discussed in chapter one
of the thesis). I will deal with this issue in greater detail in the following chapter on
Rushdie. What I would wish to note at this point is that Anderson’s lament, which is
built upon the ‘problem’ of the migrant’s relationship to ‘homeland’, reveals that
wake of Said’s seminal works, Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, the question
of culture demands to be linked to the colonial residues that continue to inhabit Western
culture. The pervasiveness of colonial acts, and the outworking of colonialism in the
shape of the contemporary world, means that colonialism lies at the heart of both
Western Culture and all that have been forced to negotiate, directly or indirectly, the
interrelated signs that suggest that culture as monologic form can never actually arrive.
The first is the notion that colonial encounter is never the clash of two unified wholes,
or the imposition of one unified whole upon an empty other. As I discussed in chapter
one, such a formulation underpins what could be considered the logic of the discourse
of the postcolonial. In the models that I set forth from the outset, this logic can be
moment in Bhabha, that pushes the discourse of the postcolonial beyond the Hegelian
the diasporic, dispossessed, colonised, and culturally dislocated, or in other words, those
that occupy a cultural space that does not fit into conventional, homogeneous national
and racial typologies, Bhabha is able to open up excessive spaces that interrupt the
terms of such conventions. The presence of the postcolonial subject, since culture is
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staged via colonialism, thus demands a rethinking of culture, in terms of both its
constitution and its transformation. Bhabha’s infrastructures seize what I have called
Further insight into the disturbing and sublime character of the discourse of the
notion of the third space. The third space, as an articulation in a body of work that
consists of a series of open fragments, ironies, and clusters linked to various issues in
order to provoke and disrupt rather than instruct (an apt description of the discourse of
the postcolonial as outlined in chapter one), in many ways remains consistent with the
as the “motif or trope” for the third space. Bhabha tells us, therefore, that this “theory
translation that is marked by the unpresentable. To say close is also to imply a gap, a
not quite, a something beyond. It is to ask as it explains: how is culture not like a
language? How does culture exceed theory? To say close is thus to blur that distinction
demands to be located. This is what is implied in the location metaphor that titles
Bhabha’s work. The location of culture works against the idea of the Nietzschean
nomad, and the Lyotardian event. The critical work of both of these notions is
established on the basis of not being able to be located. The Location of Culture doesn’t
quite fit what would constitute an assertion concerning culture: ‘culture is this!’ as the
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definite article implies. Any assertion seems at once to take on the character of a
question. Bhabha seizes this space of questioning, its excess, and opens it up as a
productive site. I would contend that such an opening up, a questioning, in the context
of the monolithic understandings of culture that have been reinvigorated of late, takes
on the character of the sublime, that I have suggested lies at the core of the third space
of enunciation.
I would thus wish to propose another analogy to draw out the transgressive
nature of the Bhabha’s work. This analogy can be found in the Lyotard of the body and
desire, as opposed to the Lyotard of the Kantian turn, to which the previous chapter is
devoted. I would wish to take up what Lyotard rejected, in order to articulate what is at
order to disrupt Enlightenment reason, Lyotard at this earlier stage in his career, sought
to liberate the libidinal intensities. The “object of the desire of every ‘science’”, he
writes, “is the regulation of displacements, the law: thus the exclusion of libidinal
intensities from its object and thus, also, from its discourse”.424 In another setting, with
semiotics in his sight, he also writes, “signs are not only terms, stages, set in relation
and made explicit in a conquest; they can also be, indissociably, singular and vain
intensities in exodus”.425
I would suggest that these are apt terms for an engagement in Bhabha’s
evocation of the colonial encounter as discursive. Drawing on Freud, desire for Lyotard
operates in two distinct ways: there is the sense of wish (Wunsch) and that of force or
energy (Nietzsche’s Wille)”. The human psyche is thus marked by a tension which
erupts between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Through a process of
repression the reality principle — reason, order — asserts itself over the pleasure
temporal succession”.426 For Lyotard this process corresponds to the rule of science, in
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which the abstract reigns over the liberation of the creative forces of art. He thus seeks
to realise, what he terms the figural, or the sphere of unbounded pleasure in Freud’s
language, via art movements. The accent here is upon the transgressive and disruptive
capacity of art, which attacks Enlightenment reason in order to set libidinal intensities
adrift in a world of creativity and production. Transgression finds its feet in art, and it
I would wish to take up, perhaps erroneously, is the distinction between figure and
discourse.
But it is important to note, and here we can make a distinction between the
power of the figural as a precursor to the postmodern and its failure in the postcolonial,
that the figural does not exercise a total privilege over discourse. It does not constitute a
new totality. Desire has two distinct dimensions. Whilst it may function
transgressively, it also is able to affirm new discourses in which the figural is present. It
is interesting in the colonial context, as we find in Bhabha, that the work of affirmation
does not seem to be developed. Bhabha’s work underscores the productive capacity of
bible’427 functions transgressively, rather than affirms an object with a new life of its
own. The new object, whilst it is not prefigured in the Hindu/Christian dialectic, can
only be understood, like all transgressions,428 in relation to the force or the rule that it
seeks to transgress. The hybrid object does not have a life of its own apart from its
transgressive, its sublime function. In the context of colonial encounter the new object
functions to disrupt the ratio of power between the colonial and the native,429 rather than
effect a positive political program. This means that Bhabha paints a rather bleak picture
transgression.
254
The terms that I have outlined thus situate the question of politics in a distinct
in-between location. On the one hand we have the colonial which is characterised in
terms of Hegelian reason, or the work of discourse in Lyotard’s scheme. This is what
drives the colonial encounter, this is the structure of (Western) being, or at least is the
ontology upon which the West has been built, and which the colonised subject seeks to
dismantle. Bhabha’s own critical work engages in this undertaking both in its open
structure, and as it marshals the support of Lacan, Derrida, among others, thinkers at the
productive transgressive desire, the figural, which manifests itself in the contest of
signs. Hegelian being is thus asserted and disavowed at the same time. Figure and
discourse arise simultaneously, each working against the other, but neither is ultimately
assertion, and vice versa. What this means is that the dialectic of domination is always
present in this discursive encounter. This is a clash of desires, which pits reason and
order, its teleology, against an other which must partially assimilate, or set forth a
that Bhabha champions the transgressive, rather than the affirmative. It suggests that
the colonised self is on the defensive, that there is an aggressor. And the fact that the
only option that seems available, in Bhabha’s scheme, reveals that this is never a level
field of play.
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such spatial histories of displacement … make the question of how culture
Survival in this context consists of negotiating (negating?) the complexes that emerge
through cultural displacement. The metaphor is split between a sense of hardship and
loss, but at the same time of productivity and resourcefulness. In the context of the
organising fiction for this collection of essays — ‘the location of culture’ — survival
emerges as a productive force which seeks to overcome the demands of the Hegelian
desire for social unity. “Culture is the strategic activity of ‘authorizing’ agency: not the
into play in situations in which a threat becomes an overruling force. There is the
possibility that something can be destroyed, or removed. Survival implies that the
threat has been faced and is overcome, defeated, or at the very least postponed.
disturbing space that wrests the sublime from its conservative trajectory. In a critical
announces her refusal to see the dance work Still/Here, “on the grounds that [the] use of
HIV positive dancers, and of video testimony by AIDS patients turned the art of dance
into “victim art”, a “travelling medicine show”432 ! he sets forth the idea that culture is
may be missing the show’s spectacular performance of survival — the attempt ...
to counter the privacy and primacy of the individual self with the collective
historical memory?”433
256
The notion of survival thus emerges as inseparably linked to questions concerning
identity and community. If there is an inbetween temporal moment, that is a people free
from the myth of a continuous past, then what constitutes the social bond, the sense of
temporal continuity between them. Survival also requires the courage to live
through the flux and transition of cessation. ... She cannot envisage an art that
would short-circuit the sublime, transcendent option to plug into a dialogue with
a community that establishes its solidarity and group identity through sharing a
The upshot is a theory for cultural transformation, and a call for a rethinking of
questions concerning the constitution of the social bond.435 The metaphor of survival
demands a location that is set in relation to an act which seeks to deprive. The point of
the metaphor is that it highlights the temporal disjunctions that characterise the threat of
depravation, and calls forth the necessity for dealing with the condition of imposition.
As such ‘survival’ underscores the necessity of the transgressive nature of desire, rather
than the affirmative. The Bhabharian subject is caught in the space inbetween acts of
domination, that seek to impose an order, and acts of transgression, that seek to
dismantle the propensity to order. The work of Bhabha is thus embedded in what could
be called a dualism, which takes the question of culture beyond the confines of the
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monolithic, toward questions of power and transgression. In this dualism the
resistance must move beyond that mode of thinking and being to modes of desire that
are rooted in production, rather than lack. If the question of survival is the fundamental
condition of culture, then it is impossible to move beyond the conflictual terrain that
marks the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised. This condition is
always already inscribed in culture, there is no space that enables a movement beyond
it. This is why Bhabha insists, via the terms that I have outlined, that the disruptive
capacity of resistance does not erase the relationship between coloniser and colonised,
the hegemonic West and the postcolonial, but simply transforms the ratio of power
between them.
It is this dualism that marks the question of culture. Bhabha’s work can thus be
the context of contemporary cultural theory. In the Australian context in which I write,
a nostalgic cultural monolith has raised its head. The Australian political climate is
marked by a reactionary conservatism (Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party),436 and the
return of a conservative government, which, in its insistence upon ‘one rule for all’,
assumption is that this so called politics of ‘fairness’, of oneness, is not only irresistible,
questioning, and it thus reinforces the tenor of, what I have called, Bhabha’s dualistic
pessimism.
258
The recent return of a conservative government, and public re-emergence of
nationalism signals that colonial desire remains embedded in ‘white Australia’s’ psyche.
situations in which reason’s processes are on the prowl. Those that are not included in
this rhetoric, are forced to negotiate the structures that seek to produce a totality from
the disparate elements that mark the social. As Bhabha suggests, it seems futile to
contend this rhetoric with a resistance that finds its basis in an opposite cultural purism,
discourse, as opposed to the figural. Such a politics merely reinforces the tenor of
Hegelian desire, which demands an enemy, a task, to generate its own sense of
The crucial contribution that Bhabha makes to theory is that he puts back a
perspective upon culture that is grounded in reason processes, that has been lost in
recent preoccupations with the postmodern. Whilst it has been suggested that Bhabha
around cliché, his work consistently deals with the reality of a Hegelianism that is alive
and well in the West. What we find in Bhabha is a staging of culture as radically
divided. As governments refuse to deal with cultural difference, and outmoded slogans
such as ‘we are monocultural’ begin to re-emerge in the public sphere as a matter of
serious debate, the disruptive force, the scandal, of the migrant and the dispossessed that
Bhabha underscores could not be more valid. All this suggests that cultural identity is
always already relational, always already worked out in and through the complex
workings of desire: discourse? figural? This, whilst I have attempted to reveal Bhabha’s
clash between strategies of unity, and strategies of transgression. This is what marks the
present day. It is a pessimistic and bleak picture, but I would suggest that it represents
259
an apt ‘snap-shot’ of the West as it is. If ever there is the possibility that the world’s
differences and myriad accents will come to the fore in public life, then the process of
continuing preoccupation with racial, cultural, and national purity. Bhabha’s work takes
up this challenge.
Western hegemony. Given the conservative use of the sublime in establishing reason’s
authority, what Bhabha seizes is the excess of the excess, that which the process of
unity fails to bring to a coherent order. As such Bhabha effectively unleashes the
sublime from the shackles of reason. His work, in its polyphonic form, and the
transgression emerges. As I have shown, this process of transgression is built upon the
question of the sublime. In having charted the terms of the postcolonial sublime
through Bhabha, I would wish to turn to the texts of Rushdie, to further explore the
Notes
367
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 175.
368
Robert Young in White Mythologies (London: Routledge, 1990) champions
Bhabha’s eclectic use of a wide range of theories and ideas, which have no obvious
logical linkage, as exemplary postcolonial criticism. Such a strategy for Young resists
being reduced to a “consistent metalanguage”, and the postcolonial critical tools that are
set forth cannot be reified “into static concepts” (146-147).
369
W.J.T. Mitchell, in an interview with Bhabha (“Translator Translated”, Artforum,
(March 1995), 80-83, 110, 114, 118-119): “the book has been controversial; I’ve heard
260
it characterized as too difficult, as too political, as not political enough” (81). Compare
Kwame Appiah, “The Hybrid Age”, Times Literary Supplement (27 May 1994), 5, who
reads Bhabha as a ‘leftist’; and Benita Parry, “Signs of our times”, Third Text, vol.
28/29 (1994), 5-24, who argues that Bhabha has been seduced by a poststructuralist
textualism. See also Aijaz Ahmad, “The Politics of Postcoloniality”, Race and Class,
vol. 36, no. 3 (1995), 1-20; and Asha Varadharajan, Exotic Parodies (Minneapolis:
Minnesota University Press, 1995), 22-23, who take up a similar position to Parry.
370
See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, trans. R.W. Rotsel (Ann
Arbor: Ardis), 1973.
371
See for example Mitchell and Bhabha, “Translator Translated”, 14. Bhabha’s
celebration of the moment of indeterminacy, as the moment in which freedom and
politics is possible, is drawn directly from Derrida. See also Homi Bhabha, “Freedom’s
Basis in the Indeterminate”, October, no. 61 (1992), 46-57. He writes, “it has been my
growing conviction that encounters and negotiations of differential meanings and values
within the governmental discourses and cultural practices that make up “colonial”
textuality have enacted, avant la lettre, many of the problematics of signification and
judgement that have become current in contemporary theory” (48).
372
See Paul Gilroy’s, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1993).
373
Lyotard makes this point in Driftworks, trans. R. McKeon (New York: Semiotext(e),
1984), about dialectical criticism. The problem is that dialectical critique functions as a
kind of photographic negative of capitalism, preserving itself within the same
representational framework. The critique instead of surpassing capitalism thus
consolidates it.
374
See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London:
Macmillan, 1933), 77.
375
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 241.
376
Bhabha cites Mladan Dolar’s unpublished manuscript, The Legacy of the
Enlightenment: Foucault and Lacan.
377
See Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?”, trans. Catherine Porter, in The
Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1984), 32-50.
378
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 244.
379
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 243.
380
Bhabha’s critique is akin to Spivak’s interrogation of Deleuze and Foucault in “Can
the Subaltern Speak?”, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Gary Nelson
and Lawrence Grossberg (London: Macmillan, 1988), 271-311. Spivak argues that
Deleuze and Foucault, in voicing their opposition to capitalist exploitation, homogenise
the international division of labour, and overlook crucial differences between third
world and first world workers. By masking the differences between workers within the
context of global capitalism, the narrative fabricated in Deleuze’s and Foucault’s
“Intellectuals and Power” is seen to be complicit with the anonymous subject that is
261
concealed in the narrative of Western history. Both of these French intellectuals refuse
to acknowledge what Spivak calls a “sign, structure operating experience” (279). Such
a refusal allows them to collapse the European “Subject of desire and power” with the
“subject of the oppressed”. This leads to, Spivak continues, an “essentialist, utopian
politics” (276).
381
Terry Maley, “The Politics of Time: Subjectivity and Modernity in Max Weber”, in
The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment, ed. Asher
Horowitz and Terry Maley (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1994), 147.
382
Maley, “The Politics of Time”, 147-148.
383
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 240.
384
See J. Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983), 1-41.
385
Tony Spybey, Social Change and Dependency (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 113.
386
Simon During, “Postmodernism or Post-colonialism Today”, Textual Practice, vol.
1, no. 1 (1987), 33.
387
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 236.
388
Homi Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition”, in
Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and
Laura Chrisman (Hemel Hempstead, England: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 114.
389
Fanon cited in Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 237.
390
Frantz Fanon, Peau Noire Masques Blancs (Paris: Éditions Du Seuil, 1954), 207.
391
Bhabha writes, “I claim a generality for Fanon’s argument because he talks not
simply of the historicity of the black man, as much he writes in ‘The fact of blackness’
about the temporality of modernity within which the figure of the ‘human’ comes to be
authorized” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 236).
392
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 241-242.
393
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 237.
394
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 21.
395
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 25, 5.
396
See Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back:
Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989).
397
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86.
398
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 89.
399
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86.
400
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 97.
262
401
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 193.
402
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 127.
403
Lord Alfred Tennyson, “Idylls of the King”, in The Concept of Empire: Burke to
Attlee, 1774-1947, ed. George Bennett (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1962), 256.
404
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776;
New York: The Modern Library, 1937), 899-900.
405
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 113-114.
406
Bhabha writes, “my contention, elaborated in my writings on postcolonial discourse
in terms of mimicry, hybridity, sly civility, is that this liminal moment of identification
! eluding resemblance ! produces a subversive strategy of subaltern agency that
negotiates its own authority through a process of iterative ‘unpicking’ and
incommensurable, insurgent relinking. It singularizes the ‘totality’ of authority by
suggesting that agency requires a grounding, but it does not require a totalization of
those grounds; it requires movement and manoeuvre, but it does not require a
temporality of continuity or accumulation; it requires direction and contingent closure
but no teleology and holism (Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 184-185).
407
See Homi Bhabha, “Signs taken for Wonders”, in The Location of Culture, 102-122.
408
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 33.
409
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 23.
410
Manuel Castells, The City and the Grass Roots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban
Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 4.
411
Benita Parry, “Signs of Our Times”, 9, 7.
412
Parry, “Signs of Our Times”, 13.
413
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 37.
414
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 223, 228, 226, 225.
415
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York:
Schocken Books, 1968), 73, 79.
416
Benjamin, Illuminations, 80.
417
Benjamin, Illuminations, 69.
418
Benjamin, Illuminations, 81.
419
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 224.
420
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 25.
421
Homi Bhabha, David Bennett, and Terry Collits, “The Postcolonial Critic”, Arena,
no. 96 (1991), 62.
263
422
Homi Bhabha, “The Third Space”, in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed.
Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 210, 211.
423
Jean-François Lyotard, Driftworks, trans. R. McKeon (New York: Semiotext(e),
1984), 57-68.
424
Jean-François Lyotard, “On a Figure of Discourse”, in Toward the Postmodern, ed.
Robert Harvey and Mark Roberts (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993), 14.
425
Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1993), 50.
426
Lyotard, “On a Figure of Discourse”, 13, 14.
427
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 102-122.
428
See Michel Foucault’s “A Preface to Transgression”, Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 29-52.
429
Bhabha, “The Postcolonial Critic”, 62.
430
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 172.
431
Bhabha, “The Postcolonial Critic”, 50-51.
432
Homi Bhabha, “Dance this Diss Around”, Artforum, April (1995), 19.
433
Bhabha, “Dance this Diss Around”, 20.
434
Bhabha, “Dance this Diss Around”, 20. See also Homi Bhabha, “A Question of
Survival: Nations and Psychic States”, in Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory, ed.
James Donald (Houndsmill: Macmillan, 1991), 96.
435
See Homi Bhabha’s, “Black Male”, Artforum (February 1995), 86-87. See also
Bhabha’s “Novel Metropolis”, New Statesman (16 February 1990), 16-18.
436
See Pauline Hanson’s “One Nation” web site: http//:www.gwb.com.au/onenation/
437
For an interesting comparison of a similar phenomena in France in the 50’s, see
Roland Barthes, “A Few Words from Monsieur Poujáde”, The Eiffel Tower and other
Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), 51-53.
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Chapter Six
A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.438
sublime. Firstly, the postcolonial sublime arises as a material excess that marks the
impossibility of the tenability of myths of cultural unity. I have drawn upon the Kantian
stake in evoking this excess. What emerges is the notion that in order to disrupt
reason’s authority it is necessary to unleash the sublime from its conservative shackles.
In the face of the threat of the sublime, European reason was supremely confident that
such a threat would never overtake its capacity to unify conscious thought, and by
extension the social. We could say that the discourse of the postcolonial begins when
this supreme confidence is put into doubt. Fanon’s bodily excesses underscore this task.
Secondly, the discourse of the postcolonial can be located alongside the postmodern,
rather than implicated in it. I have argued in my critical engagement with Lyotard and
sublime excess that the discourse of the postcolonial opens up, signals that the pure
event that lies at the critical core of Lyotard’s postmodern sublime is inadequate. For
the discourse of the postcolonial the signs of culture and history are overfull, rather than
empty question marks. Thus instead of the pure sites that preoccupy Lyotardian
In this chapter I propose to bring these concerns together. I will follow several
caught in a Romantic literary model, that either denounces or celebrates his work on the
basis of its complicity in the myth of a heroic literature. I have in mind here my
discussion in chapter three on Hegel’s Romantic slave. As Fanon reveals, such a binary
contend that this is true of Rushdie’s literature also. His work resists at every turn the
engagement with the question of the postmodern and the postcolonial, I will then turn to
I would wish to challenge such a reading on two interrelated fronts. Firstly, I will show
that in Ahmad’s rigid critical practice a leakage, a moment of excess arises that
the support of Shame, The Satanic Verses, and The Moor’s Last Sigh, I will show that
contaminations that mark what I have called the postcolonial sublime. Finally I will
take up Rushdie’s literature in social terms, and with his own statements concerning the
public necessity of the artist in mind, I will further develop the postcolonial sublime by
Rushdiecriticism
In the wake of Marxist models of literary production the mystique that surrounds
the art of the exiled has been contested. Indeed in celebrations of the high modernist art
that ranges from Joyce’s Ulysses to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, from E. M. Forster’s A
Passage to India to D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent, and from Conrad’s “Heart
of Darkness” to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon the alienated exile has emerged
in aesthetic theory as a gifted social figure. Exile as a form of alienation was considered
266
a metaphor for the dehumanising effects of modernity. The splintering of the frame and
rejection of realism in Picasso’s painting and Modernist literature, were built upon a
destruction of form. Against such a celebration of exile, Marxists such Lukács have
irresponsibility can be read in terms of Lukács’ rejection of the power of alienation. His
concern with the (ir)responsibility of Rushdie’s artistic form is drawn up in terms of the
problematic figure of the migrant intellectual, who, for many, corresponds to that great
both economic and intellectual privileges, and is distanced from his subject(s), his art
fails to engage in the struggle that makes History. In more general terms, Rushdie can
perpetuate dominant myths. Harveen Sachdeva Mann argues in such terms. The
Satanic Verses, Mann contends, works through a problematic in which the postmodern
attack upon materialism is simply an intellectual elitism that alienates ‘the people’.
Mann writes:
there is … a disjunction between Rushdie’s stated desire and textual practice, that,
in fact, the “average,” majority Indian migrant in Britain is not his principal target
reader in The Satanic Verses becomes amply clear from the author’s linguistic
practices. While his multilingualism in The Satanic Verses can, on the one hand,
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wordplay of modernism, the elitist learning of the privileged academic, and the
Saleem as the creative centre440) reads Midnight’s Children in terms of its moment of
production: Rushdie’s limited recollection of India from the metropolitan centre. The
limits of this cultural location are reflected in the text through the figure of Saleem, who
accepts the part for the whole, and writes his history through the metaphor of sexual
competence upon the body of woman. Kane contends that the fluidity of the Midnight’s
narrative remains far from open, and is secure in the domain of its creator, the master
Saleem. The “phallic model”, Kane declares, “emphasises Saleem’s singular agency as
a masculine writer remote from his co-citizens.”441 Rushdie thus speaks for a literary
masculinist creator author that was valorised by the English literary establishment.
resemblance to the Kantian Genius and Hegel’s valorisation of the romantic slave (as I
discussed chapter’s two and three of this thesis). The figure of the exiled artist, the
underling that lay at the core of eighteenth-century aesthetic celebrations, has been
replayed, perhaps too quickly, in discussions concerning the figure of the migrant
intellectual. If Ahmad, Kane, and Mann draw the trope of the modern artist as
others have taken this trope in order to champion Rushdie as a kind of twentieth-century
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there is, after all, some meaning, and this lies in employing one’s recollection in
order to give history immortality. This suggests that man’s purpose in life as well
as in history is to preserve it, hand its ‘meaning’ down to others for them to listen
to, and, perhaps, to learn from. Saleem, so it appears, has learnt his moral lesson.
basically concerned with the crucial question of Indian philosophy and the Indian
mind.443
The implication is that the ‘Indian’ mind is able to be accessed more fully at a distance.
champions creative possibilities that are opened up through distance. We can recall
Kant’s spectators of the French revolution here. As I suggested in chapter four, for
Lyotard the supremacy of the Ideas over the terrifying in nature signals that at the core
rather than the supposed certainties of theoretical and practical reason. Bhabha, on the
other hand, takes issue with the universal tone that is implicated in this celebration of
the creative possibilities of aesthetic judgement (as I discussed in chapter five of this
Bhabha’s mistrust of the universal overtones that mark postmodern thinkers such as
Lyotard, leaves us with a difficult question: does Rushdie’s excess like Lyotard’s avant-
garde merely assert a new universal? I will take up this issue in detail in due course.
For the moment it is sufficient to claim that this is not the case. It seems to me that
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understood as a new universal.444 As I have shown, the purity of Lyotard’s postmodern
spaces are not what is at issue in the discourse of the postcolonial. Rather the reverse is
the case, namely that the discourse of the postcolonial sets out to reveal the
find Durix, who similarly champions Rushdie’s unbelonging and belonging. “Being a
man of the ‘First’ and of the ‘Third’ world at the same time”, Durix writes, “he may be
better equipped than many to approach contemporary political and social problems”.445
And Aikant likewise celebrates Rushdie’s self imposed exile from India as the most apt
celebration of the Kantian disinterested aesthetic that was historically located by Hegel:
the artist as authoritative outsider/underling. Paul Gray’s review of East, West pushes
such a celebration to extremes. The assumption is that a truly ‘free’ art is forged in the
face of death. The political cogency of Hegel’s theorisation of the master and slave
Since these stories cannot make things worse for Rushdie than they already are, he
To Paul Gray’s Hegelian concerns we can add, Pico Iyer’s announcement on East,
West:
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[...] all these perverse twists in have a special authority when coming from a man
who discovered riches in the same breath as a death-sentence, and acquired fame
Tom Wilhelmus likewise celebrates The Moor’s Last Sigh as a great triumph against
literary value of the work is intensified. Because “of its energy”, Wilhelmus writes,
“and tolerance, its courage and its sheer entertainment value, it is difficult not to view it
as heroic.”449
I have no problem with the notion that Rushdie has displayed nothing less than
great courage in the face of adversity. What I would wish to take issue with is the
notion that this courage belongs to, and indeed is a driving force in, myths of progress.
Such a myth, for instance, can be found at the edges of Al-Azm’s celebration of
undiminished spirit of slave culture, he frames Rushdie as a dissident, and The Satanic
If Louis Althusser can take pride in praising Spinoza’s philosophy for “terrifying
its time” by providing “one of the great lessons in heresy the world has seen,”
then I see no reason why we cannot take pride in praising Rushdie’s novel also for
“terrifying its time” by providing “one of the greatest lessons in heresy that the
Azm’s point of entry into the field of ‘Rushdiecriticism’ a step further. I would suggest
that the celebration of dissidence that underscores the surety of Dayal’s argument
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presents important difficulties. Dayal draws upon the famous French dissident Bataille
to unpack and to politicise the visceral language of Midnight’s Children, and The
Satanic Verses. The plotted line from dissident to dissident, however, produces an
interesting critical formulation that can be drawn up around similarity and difference.
We thus find a politics of “displacement” in both Bataille and Rushdie. Dayal writes,
Rushdie “shares Bataille’s rejection of the presumed hegemony of the high, pure, and
intellectual over its supplement, the low, impure, visceral”451. But in having asserted
essentialism should not be conflated with viscerality in Rushdie. Dayal thus brackets
go as far in this direction”; “Rushdie does not risk Bataille’s incendiary and essentialist
understanding of Rushdie. The shadow of Hegelian progress still looms large upon
Dayal’s critical landscape. It is difficult to see how Rushdie escapes the romantic
celebration of the slave that is at the core of Hegelian progress. This is not to suggest
relationship between Rushdie and Bataille that Dayal charts is Hegelian. I would
structure of similarity, a structure that is just one step away from the tradition of
influence that preoccupies traditional literary studies. I would wish to ask in response to
this approach, what is at stake in this bracketing? What happens to Bataille if you
remove the essence from his celebration of the visceral? What stops Rushdie from
crossing the line that Dayal has drawn? I ask this because Dayal, and indeed the
celebration of Rushdie generally, tends to isolate the critical capacity of his work. By
this I mean that criticism such as Dayal’s isolates Rushdie in the same manner that
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Lyotard isolates the Kantian sublime. Such an approach fails to deal with Rushdie’s
leakages, contaminations, his politics of excess. I would contend that Dayal’s attempt
to draw a line from Bataille to Rushdie, in order to explain and to demystify Rushdie’s
viscerality, and nothing more, misses the space of the bracket as an excessive and
uncontainable site. As such the presence of this great European dissident, though
This is a puzzling critical practice. Bataille has at once been drawn upon as a ‘pure’ site
from which to judge, and yet has also been rejected. The gesture of this rejection is
undoubtedly the essay’s strength, but it is also the site of its weakness, for in having
excesses back against Bataille’s essentialism. Rather than pay attention to the nuances
a diverse and rich field built upon critical contaminations that produce new sites,
disruption, and perhaps even critical dialogue, Dayal reduces Rushdie to the mere
sort, I would thus argue that studies that situate Rushdie as a kind of heroic dissident
have missed what troubles thinkers such as Ahmad. Even though Ahmad is prone to an
Hegelian vision of art, he still sees something much more disturbing, more excessive,
more resistant to the comparative approach of Dayal, or the Hegelian insistence upon
the regenerative capacity of slave culture. With this sense of more troubling
disturbances, I would wish to turn to work of Ahmad. For it is Ahmad who, perhaps
unwittingly, opens a much more politically cogent Rushdie. And we can understand
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Ahmad and the Politics of Excess
When the Indian Marxist Aijaz Ahmad writes in his In Theory that Rushdie’s
“art can only be an art of despair”453 we are drawn into a specific understanding
broad social and historical polemic against current intellectual trends. Rushdie’s Shame
is understood by Ahmad as the deplorable formal product of the pernicious link between
the formation of a ‘Third World’ literary counter-canon, and an academic climate that is
preoccupied with debunking nationalism and rejecting materialism. For Ahmad this
model that produces questioning strategies that exclude crucial issues such as gender,
class, global capitalism, and the social determination of critical practices.454 Rushdie’s
‘art of despair’ thus emerges as the logical product of an existential being animated by
of Rushdie thus takes up the bracketed sublime of Lyotard, as manifest in his work upon
clear that this is so throughout — sets forth what I would consider to be several
oversimplifications are underpinned by the notion that Shame, and Rushdie’s work
generally, represents only the unmediated perspective of the privileged class, and
excludes the heroic struggle of the under-class. Rushdie is thus condemned to represent
a ‘Pakistan in slices’. The totality, which necessarily includes the historic struggle of an
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underclass against oppression, is thus ignored. A text that has lost sight of the totality in
this manner thus loses sight of the real issues, and represents the real tragedy of tyrants
comically,455 perpetuates misogyny against women, and plummets into the depths of
But is this link between Rushdie’s art and the avant-garde tenable? Is it valid to
assume that avant-gardist art and theory have seduced Rushdie’s postcoloniality such
that the form and stakes of his texts can only be considered the mere reflection of the
avant-gardist master texts? For the thesis this question is crucial. I have maintained
that the discourse of the postcolonial cannot simply be defined as a moment within the
postmodern formulations. I would contend that Rushdie’s art refuses at every turn to be
contained in the neat oppositions that underpin such judgements. In its sheer excess this
is an art that poses questions that more conventional political and artistic models fail to
deal with.
Ahmad’s judgement upon Rushdie draws upon the age-old opposition between
the socialist realist novel form and the fragmented and ‘unmediated totalities’ that
two different forms in modernist literature. First, the hero is strictly confined
within the limits of his own experience. There is not for him — and
apparently not for his creator — any pre-existent reality beyond his own self,
acting upon him or being acted upon by him. Secondly, the hero himself is
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neither forms nor is formed by it. The only ‘development’ in this literature is
Lukács draws a dividing line between modernism and critical realism. What is at issue
is the manner in which the artist negotiates the dialectic between the subjective self and
the historical world. Art in Lukács’ language occupies the space between the poles of
this opposition, or at least is able to reproduce an ontological space that holds this
opposition in a tension, such that one side is not reduced to the other. This is a problem
for modernist art, which, Lukács argues, mistakenly confuses the objective world for the
‘loss of a love object’, a sentimental ‘excess’ that “casts a pathological shade on the
grief, forcing it to express itself in the form of self-reproaches, to the effect that the
mourner himself is to blame for the loss of the loved one”.458 Self-blame, or at least the
sense of hopelessness that comes from the realisation that nothing could, or can be done,
produces a narcissistic withdrawal into a relation with the lost object. If we are to
follow Lukács this is the narcissistic tendency that manifests itself in modernist art.
Modernism, as a melancholic form, has lost the material world as an object, and
redirected its energy into the subjective, Idealist world of the self.
understood as a kind of political despair in which “one acts … not because one hopes to
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(post)modernist formulation: “I can’t go on ... I will go on”,461 and Rushdie’s aesthetic.
Such despair thus lends itself to the political conclusion that this is an ‘art’ form that is
politically irresponsible.
The finality of Ahmad’s political judgement suggests that Rushdie has been
‘summed up’, that the secret that underpins his work has been revealed in its entirety.
This is also a judgement that becomes prescriptive in its enunciation. After Ahmad
there appears to be no room for debate. A politically productive art is possible only if
certain formal practices are adhered to. But in the weave of Ahmad’s text we find a
significant anomaly that works against this sense of finality, and opens up a useful space
for engaging in Rushdie’s fiction, and ultimately in the discourse of the postcolonial.
This anomaly emerges initially in the moment that Ahmad necessarily concedes that he
also has given us only a slice of his object. In staging an attack based upon Rushdie’s
class affiliations — and hence a partial representation of Pakistan that excludes the role
of the historical and heroic underclass struggling against the conditions of oppression —
Ahmad is anxious to point out that the Rushdie that he presents is ‘pure’. In other
words, his pre-fatwa Rushdie has not been tainted by that frenzy of publication that
marked the Satanic Verses Affair. Ahmad’s is a cool, detached speculative reason.
This means that Rushdie’s Shame merely articulates as its organising fiction what for
Ahmad is a claim that attempts to reveal the ‘pure’ nature of his inquiry. Of course the
assumption is that this pure part directly relates to, and in a sense informs, Rushdie’s art
A quick glance at the Rushdie affair, for instance, reveals that Rushdie’s art
occupies a messy and conflictual terrain that is marked by various voices disputing
(violently) how Rushdie’s art can be made to mean. The Satanic Verses has been
resisted and championed in a variety of concrete national contexts, and upon divergent
political fronts. The proper name, ‘Rushdie’, has been subject to an agonistic process of
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inscription that renders its meaning illusive and uncertain. ‘Rushdie’ has been the site
for dispute, clash, struggle. We find ‘Rushdie’ contested, for instance, in the cultural
for equity and justice,463 and in the political opportunism of Iran’s powerful clerics.464
We also find ‘Rushdie’ inscribed into the discourse of ‘free expression’, the valorisation
of the autonomy of the artist and aesthetic object,465 the defence of capitalist
should know their Koran, of course, but they should also know their Shakespeare”.467
Rushdie’s inscription, despite the appearance of a rigid set of critical agendas, thus
remains far from settled. The affair reveals that an official version of Rushdie is yet to
arrive. Cultural ownership of this proper name and what it means is illusory. As
English Literature, Rushdie’s work remains a disputed entity, a signal that the literary
This historical moment reveals that Rushdie’s art in many ways exceeds the possibility
of formulation. There is simply too much Rushdie to be contained in the part. Just as
novel.468
This means that Ahmad’s study reveals that a final judgement about Rushdie’s
art is yet to be made. For the attempt to contain and confine the aesthetic, like all
attempts at a universal politics, can only ever be incomplete. The problem of excess
and its relation to the political can be found in that moment in which an excess bursts
forth and haunts Ahmad’s controlled social and historical text. At a point in the
argument that attempts to set forth the political seriousness of art, Ahmad makes an
interesting turn to the language of traditional aesthetics and concedes, “both the parody
and the burlesque are at times delicious, inventive, hilarious”. But this brief lapse into
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continues, “Rushdie has given us a Laughter which laughs, unfortunately, much too
often … that one is in danger of forgetting that Bhutto and Zia were in reality no
buffoons, but highly capable and calculating men whose cruelties were entirely
methodical”.469 I would contend that this lapse into the ‘delicious’ pleasure of the text
by Ahmad produces an interesting problematic. For this is a lapse that reveals that
Rushdie’s fiction works in (at least) two distinct ways, and suggests that the relationship
between the aesthetic and the political in the postcolonial context is much more
How is it possible for a text to be pleasurable and at the same time in a state of
political despair? What strategies of thinking enable this opposition between aesthetic
own discussion demands that we should — it seems that a direct cognitive judgement of
the work has been privileged over a purely aesthetic feeling. The metaphor ‘delicious’
and doesn’t maintain the rule that governs the object. This is a pleasure in the literary
characters as they are in themselves, in the form in which they appear in the
imagination. The “hilarity” that Ahmad concedes, in this instance, is thus not in any
way related to the laughter that, as Bergson writes, “does not belong to the province of
aesthetic; he assigns no symbolic value to this aesthetic pleasure in this instance. Thus a
certain aesthetic ‘deliciousness’ is enjoyed, and with it all of the trappings of Kant’s
judgement of taste: a disinterest in the object that bypasses cognitive knowledge,471 the
concept in order to judge what the object ought to be,473 and perhaps even the possibility
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judgements of taste.474 But it is striking to find that Ahmad is at great pains to break
with this aesthetic disinterestedness in order to judge the work in purely political terms.
introduces a puzzling moment. The excessive “Laughter” seems to move beyond the
limits of aesthetic pleasure, enters the symbolic and produces a negative political effect.
Perhaps this textual moment in Rushdie can be described as a movement beyond the
beautiful to the sublime. This would mean that Ahmad’s rejection of Rushdie is based
upon a rejection of the conservatism, as I argued in chapter two, of the Kantian Sublime.
I intend to deal with this issue in due course. For the moment, however, I am interested
in the problematics of this textual movement. Why does Ahmad seem to embrace
aesthetic pleasure in one moment, and then in the next reject the excesses that this
pleasure produces? Clearly, for Ahmad, pleasure and politics are incommensurable. I
use the term incommensurable because I am not sure just where the line between a
disinterested aesthetic pleasure and politics in this instance can be drawn, and I am not
convinced that Ahmad would have us draw it either. I would contend, however, that
what this puzzling moment reveals is that there is another agenda at work in this
consideration of art and politics and the politics of art. It seems that Ahmad has made a
theoretical switch without telling us. I would suggest that this is a switch, subtle and
allusive as it is, from Kant’s aesthetic, as I have outlined, to a more Hegelian conception
of art.
Ahmad makes a very clear point: “too much” laughter detracts from social
capacity of the text to deliver what could be called a representation that reveals the
object’s rules. Rushdie’s excesses seem to work against this representational capacity,
and instead produce a condition of ‘forgetting’ what constitutes objects (in this case
Bhutto and Zia) in the actual world. The issue for Ahmad has thus moved beyond
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aesthetic pleasure to questions concerning adequate representation. Ahmad is interested
in the denotative capacity of art. Art is thus an object of cognition, it tells us something
about the state of the world. It seems that aesthetic excess interferes in that cognitive
process, and thus produces falsity, or at the very least detracts from objective reality.
writes:
literature. Achilles and Werther, Oedipus and Tom Jones, Antigone and Anna
rules. The problem of the author’s social context — the ‘context of creation’ — and the
degree to which that context is able to be dealt with in an individual and imaginative
way, is vital in Ahmad’s implicit demand for a representational art. How is it possible
for art to be at once determined by the social everyday and open to the possibilities of
imaginative creation? Lukács draws upon Hegel to triumphantly solve this problem.
He introduces the category of potentiality to stage the crucial relation between the inner
subjective self and the outer social world.476 This relation is characterised as the
essential opposition between the abstract and the concrete nature of human existence.
Hegel writes:
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In order to comprehend what development is, what may be called two different
states must be distinguished. The first is what is known as capacity, power, what I
Here we find a notion in which the individual self, with an inner world, coincides with
the world of social relations, the outer world. It is an opposition which, for Lukács,
effects two basic responses: on the one hand, the idealism of subjective interiority which
can imagine an infinite number of historical possibilities for the self, and on the other,
the concrete actions, the willing interaction of the inner self with objective reality in
order to achieve the self’s inner intentions. The creative self is thus always already
located in relation to the social world. Authentic acts of creation therefore negotiate the
social, and it is precisely the failure to stage this relation in an adequate way, on the part
of Rushdie who seemingly errs on the side of the subjective, that Ahmad denounces.
The question of art has thus moved in Ahmad’s text from the domain of the
purely aesthetic, with its subjective pleasures, to the domain of knowledge, and
subsequently politics, from the realm of Kant’s Critique of Judgement to that of Hegel’s
attempts to reject and close down aesthetic excess in the name of a pure politics.
pleasure and politics. In his implicit insistence upon potentiality the opposition
functions, like all oppositions, hierarchically, and representational art is privileged over
what is considered to be unmediated pleasure. But I would contend that this attempt to
depoliticise the pleasure of the text, precisely because of the theoretical switch that
informs it, is inadequate in its engagement with Rushdie. Ahmad’s turn to a Hegelian
conception of art, despite conceding that aesthetic pleasure in terms of Kant’s outline of
the judgement of taste is at certain points legitimate (what a delicious text!), fails to deal
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with the nuances of the art/politics nexus that inhabits Rushdie. Put simply, Ahmad’s
approach to art, at the expense of the nuances of a questioning art that seeks to disrupt
rigid theoretical paradigms, and open up the question of politics itself.479 Ahmad reads
Marxist/Postmodernist fence the artist seems to sit. But in having evoked excess as
I would wish to take up the excesses that Ahmad finds troubling. Clearly such
excess belongs to the discourse of the sublime. And whilst I have utilised Kant to open
up this sublime, I would contend that ultimately the excess that Rushdie opens up
Midnight’s Children in order to unpack the politics of Rushdie’s excess. In this work
the relation between the issues of migrancy and nationalism are taken up as a site upon
which an historical excess may be written. I would wish to theorise this historical
to those of my country.480
Midnight’s Children can be considered a seminal work that draws a politics of excess
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Rushdie stages a politics not by putting history to death, thus denying social
obligation, but, through the notion that history itself is excessive as opposed to
insular and singular, foregrounds the necessity of judgement. His is thus not an
historicism in the face of the real as excess. In other words, the most compelling
issue in Rushdie, in the context of this thesis, is the ‘too much’ history that an elite
Indian nationalism is forced struggle with. The problematic replays what I have
teleology of nationalism, the postcolonial sublime is the excess that such a teleology
is unable to subordinate to its rule. Rushdie is interested in this excess. Thus as soon
as we enter the terrain of history in Rushdie we are in the terrain of the postcolonial
sublime.
construction of the historical self in Midnight’s Children. I will begin with the
question: how does an artist write history? For Ahmad, Rushdie simply produces
part of the Poet to humour the Imagination ... by mending and perfecting Nature”482
(as discussed in chapter two of the thesis). Such an assertion, for Ahmad, is
struggle. Thus, with prescriptive overtones, art ought to objectively symbolise that
struggle. But the relation of the objective scientist to the object is not the same as the
artist’s relation to the object, at least as we might understand ‘art’ since Kant. Art
such art that deals with what could loosely be called ‘history’, takes up a relation to
the object that does not necessarily correspond to the epistemological concerns of the
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objective scientist. Rushdie is a case in point. Yet an artistic relation to the
concerns and consequences, either. Art, unlike objective science, has not only its
own history, it also takes up science’s claim to objectivity in order to reveal the
subjective base that lays beneath its own creative core. Rushdie again is a case in
the object reveals itself to the subject. In this regard Ahmad’s Marxism owes much
the formulations of the rigid Ahmad. History is less a ‘grand narrative’, in the
singular, than too much, an excess, many narratives. As such, rather than deny
historical fact from both the history of the writing of historical facts, and the creative
politics of the subject that engages in such facts. In such a formulation the relation of
the subject to the object is not impossible, but difficult and unsettled.
epistemology, to underscore what has been my concern throughout the thesis: what
are the political implications of a politics of excess? Whilst excess has been, and
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and the sublime (chapter’s two and three). Since the discourse of the postcolonial
work is crucial in this undertaking since it takes up historical excess in order to open
Thus it must be noted that Rushdie’s art refuses the pretension to objectivity
structures his vision for objective creative writing. However, on the other hand, we
do not find the disinterested aesthetic that has been erected in the name of Kant
creative space that assumes that the subjective and the objective have no relation, or
conversely, that they must be held in a rigid tension. Rather, it is to foreground both
the form and the stakes of such a relation. We can think Rushdie’s excess in terms of
how should we judge history? Thus, at the outset, Midnight’s Children confronts the
reader with the first person narrator, Saleem, who is in the process of writing
located in the split that I have suggested inhabits the term ‘history’. Saleem seems to
be caught in a strange struggle that would render the space of the objective and the
Saleem introduces himself and the aim and the scope of the project by telling
independence from colonial rule. His relation to this historical event, to Indian
occupy a central place in Rushdie’s oeuvre: “joined, if only by elastic bands”;483 “‘to
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be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta, tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to
die’;484 the comma in-between East, West;485 and, “here-I-stand-or-sit with my life’s
writing is to dispel the meaningless void that haunts the edges of his being.
[…] time (having no further use for me) is running out. I will soon be thirty-
one years old. Perhaps. If my crumbling, over-used body permits. But I have
no hope of saving my life, nor can I count on having even a thousand nights
meaning — yes, meaning — something. I admit it: above all things, I fear
absurdity.487
metaphor of connection in the terms that Lyotard set forth in his discussion on the
possibility of meaning is staged in temporal terms. To stop time, to put a halt upon
possibilities. I use the term ‘affirmative’ in the sense that I outlined in my discussion
responsibility for outcomes. Thus despite the meaningless void, that sense of
terms of the simple divide of the subject and the object. Rushdie writes from the
muddy space in-between these clearly marked categories. His texts seek to remain
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open to what he perceives is the excess of history, and the difficulties that such an
excess presents. We can understand Rushdie’s art in terms of its disturbances to neat
formulations. This, as I have suggested, is an issue Ahmad fails to take into account.
I would thus wish to suggest that a more cogent reading of Rushdie can be
No other image in the Rushdie corpus portrays excess more aptly than Aurora
Zogoiby’s bedroom painting. Here we find what could be called a logic of the
palimpsest. Such a logic underpins Rushdie’s work generally, and becomes the
grounds for the problem of judgement that I have suggested is at the core of
Rushdie’s political project. It will be useful to include the quote in full. The implied
narrator declares:
Every inch of the walls and even the ceiling of the room pullulated with
figures, human and animal, real and imaginary, drawn in a sweeping black line
that transformed itself constantly, that filled here and there into huge blocks of
colour, the red of the earth, the purple and vermilion of the sky, the forty
Camoens with a proud father’s bursting heart found himself saying, ‘But it is
the great swarm of being itself.’ [...] she had put history on the walls, King
Gondophares inviting St Thomas the Apostle to India; and from the North,
Empora Asoka with his Pillars of Law, and the lines of people waiting to stand
with their backs against the pillars to see if they could join their hands behind
them for good luck; and her versions of erotic temple-carvings, whose explicit
details made Camoens blanch, and of the building of the Taj Mahal, after
which, as she unflinchingly showed, its great masons were mutilated, their
hands cut off, so that they could never build anything finer; and from her own
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South she had chosen the battle of Srirangapatnam and the sword of Tipu
Sultan and the magic fortress of Golconda where a man speaking normally in
the gatehouse may be heard clearly in the citadel and the coming long ago of
the Jews. Modern history was there too, there were jails full of passionate
men, Congress and Muslim league, Nehru Gandhi Jinnah Patel Bose Azad, and
were the creatures of her fancy, the hybrids, half-woman half-tiger, half-man
place was Vasco da Gama himself, setting his foot on Indian soil, sniffing the
air, and seeking out whatever was spicy and hot and made money.489
I would contend that the palimpsest opens up the question: How should we
concern with the question of excess, the latter judgement can be understood in terms
teleologies. It is thus in this split and torn space, between the registers of absolute
possibility and the constraints of political necessity (survival?), that we hear at the
edges of Saleem’s desire for affirmative meaning the term ‘rewrite’. Saleem’s desire
is a strong sense in which the younger Saleem’s cyclical separation from history,
which can be understood only as the closing down of Aurora Zogoiby’s remarkable
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thus wish to argue that in the multifarious layers that comprise Midnight’s Children,
the proper name ‘Saleem’ is a site upon which (at least) two incommensurable
discourses clash. ‘Saleem’ is both the subject in and object of this historical writing.
saying that the two Saleems are not the same person, I am saying that the mature
Saleem is writing against himself, his own failures as a midnight’s child, his
reconciling Saleem as subject, and Saleem as object. I am not convinced that this is
achieved, and I am not convinced that either position is valorised as the most apt
vantage point for writing history. What we find is a subjectivity constructed on the
basis of the dispute of the subject and the object. We find an unsettling in the face of
excess, and an opening of the question of judgement that resides in the split space of
India’s historical palimpsest. For even though the younger Saleem becomes
Pakistan demand, the mature Saleem undertakes the writing task with the aim of
establishing connections across the divide that partition, and language divisions
politics of postcolonial India and partitioned Pakistan. With this task at hand the
confusions, inversions, and excesses. Faced with the proposition that there is too
disconnected life, “I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just one of me,
you’ll have to swallow the lot as well”491 — the narrative resists both a pretension to
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objectivity and also its opposite, a disconnected Idealist subjectivity. Readers of
Midnight’s Children are thus faced with the task of unravelling just what kind of
narrative Saleem seems to be writing. I would suggest, therefore, that to read the
work as an interplay between the subjective and the objective alone, to say for
instance that ultimately Rushdie champions the subjective domain of memory and
recollection over the objective domain of historical science, would be to miss what is
crucial about Saleem’s difficult struggle against the void that is eating him away.
What Rushdie produces in the narrative that Saleem writes, and in the struggles that
mark that writing, is a crucial statement about the location and the political capacity
of art. Located in neither the camp of the objective or the subjective, but somewhere
else besides, Rushdie’s art defies the limits that this Idealist binary sets forth. Thus
rather than a romantic conception of art as the reign of the subjective self (as played
out in the Hegelian progress to the absolute), or the mimetic overtones of Ahmad,
Rushdie seeks to unsettle such formulations, to open up a politics that begins with an
historical excess.
interesting historical possibilities that the figure of the silver spittoon opens up in
Midnight’s Children. The spittoon marks the excesses and the contaminations that I
sites. The discourse of the postcolonial seeks to foreground this untenability. The
sliver spittoon is a historical object that establishes connections across the temporal
breaks that mark the text. As an object which appears to be both a part of the
historical weave of the narrative, and an object in itself that is laden with meanings,
passes from the first book to the second and third. As a counterpoint to Saleem’s
shifting relation to history, the silver spittoon emerges as a constant site from which
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such shifts are able to be articulated, and politicised. Against the attempt to put
history to death, the silver spittoon opens up the obligations and affirmative
possibilities that mark historical being. Its presence across the divisions that mark
foregrounds what has been central in this thesis, the untenability of contained spaces.
at once a utensil for the artful dispensing of spit and betel-juice and a symbolic,
meaning laden figure in itself. Its symbolic value outweighs its use-value, or at least
namely the spaces of excess that it marks. Midnight’s Children draws out the social
receptacle of spit and juices. It constitutes an apt site for exploring the political
implications of excess that are drawn up around that difficult space of disconnection
Apart from the narrative energy that is generated around the spittoon, the
object itself takes on meaningful nuances that remain constant throughout the text,
and which ultimately mirror Saleem’s aim as a writer. The silver spittoon appears as
a textual object that belongs to the modernist poet (of sorts) Nadir Khan. Saleem
and evokes, to Padma’s chagrin, words from the figures of Nadir and Rani of Cooch
Naheen:
‘I do not believe in high art … art must be beyond categories; my poetry and
woman that she is, jokes, ‘Well, I shall set aside a room, perhaps; for paan-
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eating and spittoon-hittery. I have a superb silver spittoon, inlaid with lapis
lazuli, and you must all come and practise. Let the walls be splashed with our
thread that leads to the underground home of Nadir and Mumtaz, who consummate their
love by just such spittoon-hittery, and the magicians ghetto, which is explored in the
third book. Saleem’s (creative) elaboration of the Free Islam Convocation photo,
reveals what is the case concerning spittoons throughout the text. Laden not just with
betel-juice and spit, the figure of the spittoon is a historical object, it marks the presence
of subjectivity. What can we say concerning the subjectivity that marks this cultural
site? The words of Saleem tell us the spittoon functions as a site for the gathering of
selves in what could be called an other space. It is an object that belongs to the past-
time of the people, gathered around it we find a community that cannot be defined in
terms of the auspices of the nation-state. The spittoon can be found in the spaces of
speculation, social freedom, myth and legend, and ultimately is utilised as a metaphor
for the collapse of the high/low art binary. Thus in both brass and silver the figure of
the spittoon is a site upon which the desire of the people, regardless of social privilege
In the work, the figure of the spittoon first appears in brass on the streets of
Agra. The shift from brass to silver in the text, rather than mark difference, produces an
effective valorisation of the symbolic value of the figure of the spittoon. The spittoon in
silver takes on the meanings of the spittoon in brass. Doctor Aziz, that inbetween self
who is open to new possibilities, has contracted, what Saleem calls, “a highly dangerous
form of optimism” concerning Mian Abdullah, “the hope of India’s hundred million
Muslims”. With the aim of bringing together “dozens of Muslim splinter groups” the
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Free Islam Convocation opposes itself to the Muslim League, “who demand partitioned
India”.493 It is in this context, one haunted by the possibility of violence, that we first
encounter the figure of the spittoon. Linked to the optimistic possibilities that such a
context presents — newness perforating the world — the spittoon emerges as the site
upon which such possibilities are engendered. With the subject matter of myth and
legend, gossip, and tales, the spittoon is a site for a public imagining, intellectual
The betel-chewers at the paan-shop had begun to talk about omens; calming
numberless nameless Godknowswhats that might issue from the fissuring earth.494
In similar terms the space of a public imagining that gathers around the spittoon
in colonial India is also inextricably political. The same spittoon is central in a street
scene that can be characterised by what Bakhtin called the carnivalesque.495 The
carnival, with its boy kings and excessive caricatures, occupies the muddy space, the
tension, between autonomous identities: ruler and subject, employer and worker, teacher
and pupil, husband and wife. It is a space that disturbs what appears to be a balanced
Marked by an excessive role play, the carnival is the great leveller that interrupts the
hierarchical forces of monologism. Thus the spaces of the streets, in this instance, are
marked as a disturbing excess that renders the poverty stricken street dweller a theorist
of culture rather than a subject of the state. It is worth quoting the scene at length:
Late into the evening they nudge each other with, ‘Do you remember when-’ and
‘Dried up like a skeleton on a washing line! He couldn’t even ride his-’ and ‘-I
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tell you, baba, that woman could do terrible things. I heard she could even dream
her daughters’ dreams, just to know what they were getting up to!’ But as
evening settles in the nudges die away, because it is time for the contest.
Rhythmically, in silence, their jaws move; then all of a sudden there is a pursing
of lips, but what emerges is not air-made-sound. No whistle, but instead a long
red jet of betel-juice passes decrepit lips, and moves in unerring accuracy towards
utterance of ‘Wah, wah, sir!’ and, ‘Absolute master shot!’ … Around the oldsters,
the town fades into desultory evening pastimes. Children play hoop and kabaddi
and draw beards on posters of Mian Abdullah. And now the old men place the
spittoon in the street, further and further from their squatting-place, and aim
longer and longer jets at it. Still the fluid flies true. ‘Oh too good, yara!’ The
street urchins make a game of dodging in and out between the red streams,
superimposing this game of chicken upon the serious art of hit-the-spittoon … But
here is an army staff car, scattering urchins as it comes … here, Brigadier Dodson,
the town’s military commander, stifling with heat … and here, his A.D.C., Major
Zulfikar, passing him a towel. Dodson mops his face; urchins scatter; the car
knocks over the spittoon. A dark red fluid with clots in it like blood congeals like
a red hand in the dust of the street and points accusingly at the retreating power of
the Raj.496
Built upon the principles of civility, law and order, the nation-state obligates its
subjects. Rushdie’s texts relish in the visible markers of authority, the repressive
apparatus: the military, the police, the military police. Thus within the jurisdiction of
this surveillance there are social spaces that disturb its smooth operation. It is in this
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The spittoon space is in many ways hidden from, or at least is concealed from,
the visible demands of the nation-state. As a space of gossip, of legend making, endless
stories and tales, it emerges in its boundless capacity to tell, as simply too much to
contain. Like the space of carnival, it is not an oppositional space, of anti, or counter-
stories that seek an open contest upon the plains of officialdom. Rather, the spittoon
space is marked as a disturbing force in its sheer excess, in its refusal to subordinate this
overspill that remains an unknown entity, from the perspective of the ruler. The
possibilities of such an unknown, when hidden from view in this way, become a
nagging disturbance in the sureties of the discourse of power: what is this unknown
entity really capable of? Thus within this graphic depiction of a carnival space, the
overflow from the spittoon merely bursts forth artfully, almost magically, and
pronounces the end to British tyranny when it is run over by a military car.
judgement upon the forces of colonial rule, there is also a sense in which this disturbing
excess belongs to India’s destiny, or at least to a hope for a free India. In the same
street the figure of authority, frustrated by hidden spaces — the underground lodging of
the Free Islam Convocation outlaw, Nadir Khan and his secret wife, Mumtaz and their
O awesome rage of Major Zulfy when he found that the bird [Nadir Khan] had
flown! […] Enraged Zulfy […] pelted past the cycle-rickshaw rank. Old men
were playing hit-the-spittoon and the spittoon was out in the street. Urchins
dodging in and out of the streams of betel-juice. Major Zulfy ran, ononon.
Between the old men and their target, but he lacked the urchins’ skill. What an
unfortunate moment: a low hard jet of red fluid caught him squarely in the crotch.
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A stain like a hand clutched at the groin of his battledress; squeezed; arrested his
because a second player, assuming the mad soldier would keep on running, had
unleashed a second jet. A second red hand clasped the first and completed Major
Zulfy’s day … slowly, with deliberation, he went to the spittoon and kicked it
over, into the dust. He jumped on it — once! twice! again! — flattening it, and
The scene closes in upon the futility of Major Zulfy’s violent act against the figure of
the spittoon. In concluding this comic image of Major Zulfy’s lack of competence in
the spaces of the people, Saleem tellingly announces, the “old ones retrieved their
brutalized receptacle and began to knock it back into shape”.498 The political import of
this reshaping reveals not only Saleem’s respect for the space of the spittoon, it also
reveals the un-oppositional nature of resistance that is the object of this respect. Rather
than a direct attack against the rule of authority, the old ones preserve the site upon
which the disturbing excesses of telling are able to be written. There is a sense in which
the space of the spittoon, and the endless possibilities that it generates, is inextricably
underpinning to a hope for the impunity of the spaces of the spittoon in art and in life.
He writes, thus revealing the narrative authority that he grants to such social spaces:
Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
the paan-shop — Mian Abdullah owed his downfall to his purchase, at Agra
railway station, of a peacock-feather fan […] And so it was that none of the
Hummingbird’s optimists were prepared for what happened. They played hit-the-
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spittoon, and ignored the cracks in the earth. […] the assassins reached the
campus.499
delicious gossip in Shame: the implied narrator declares, “then (the legend goes)”;500
we find instances of the “tribals who bore this tale into the bazaar”;501 the tale of Raza
Hyder’s shame “was in the wind, and in the bazaars and at the bus depots and over the
tables of cheap cafés”;502 and Rani’s shawls speak powerfully of the unspeakable
violence of her husband Iskander Harappa.503 I would suggest that like Midnight’s
Children, Shame inserts itself into the tale telling practice that gives the narrative its
form, and to speak the unspeakable in order to defy the forces of a tyrannical nation-
state.
Gossip is like water. It probes surfaces for their weak places, until it finds the
breakthrough point”.504
Gossip is an integral part in the working out of self-identity. We tell stories about each
other, as I tell this story about Rushdie, as subjects in relations of power and economic
emerges in the public speaking of the secrets of rulers. There is power in leakage, and it
is the task of tyrants to contain it, as it was the task of Raza Hyder to contain knowledge
Raza summoned his triumvirate of Generals. Radi, Bekar, and Phisaddi arrived, to
hear Hyder dredge up, for the last time, a few shards of his old authority. ‘Arrest
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these subversives!’ he demanded, waving newspapers at the Generals. ‘I want
Like the gossip in Shame, the spittoon thus represents an excess, a critical mass
of sorts, that poses a threat to unifying teleologies. The uncontainable space of the
spittoon, that mixture of spit and discourse, in many respects engenders the necessity of
state violence in this context. Violence is a necessity precisely because of the slippage
that uncontainability calls forth. Just as the excess and slippage in Kant’s architectonics
engenders the authority of reason, the violence that Rushdie’s texts foreground can be
considered a last ditch effort to contain a plethora of stories and theories. Where
pedagogy (propaganda) ends, physical violence begins. Indeed in the light of the
reason’s teleology encounters an excess that ultimately renders its success untenable.
In having been engendered with the excessive and disturbing nuances that I have
opened up, the spittoon passes from the first to the second book and enters the space of
historical memory. In the second book the spittoon is a ‘precious possession’506 that
symbolises connections to, and differentiation from, the past. As such it occupies a
muddy inbetween space. It doesn’t belong wholly to the past or to the present. Thus its
presence in the household of Ahmed and Amina is a visible sign, on the part of Amina
at least, that her identity is constituted by what is present in this time and place, and also
by what is absent, what has been constituted elsewhere. Despite her re-invention —
Mumtaz becomes Amina — the impossibility of being either one or the other is at stake
here. For Amina the migrant is caught in-between her past — her underground home
with Nadir in Agra — and her new life with Ahmed in Delhi. She is dislocated: “‘It’s
[the sun] come up in the wrong place!’”, and, “something of its jumbling influence
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remained with her and prevented her from feeling entirely at ease”, and thus is
condemned, like her parents, to “fall in love with her husband bit by bit”, whilst always
migrant in many ways exceeds the possibilities that her new world would present to her.
She is marked by the telling image of having too much past to accompany her to a new
life:
And now Aadam Aziz lifted his daughter (with his own arms), passing her up
after the dowry into the care of this man who had renamed and so re-invented her
[…] In the compartment the new Amina Sinai sat (in mint condition) with her feet
on the green tin trunk which had been an inch too high to fit under the seat”.508
characterise Rushdie’s vision of India as a palimpsest of movement and change, that the
secret and the forbidden excess of that past is attended to by the figure of the spittoon.
Stolen with some other precious items, and then discovered in the bed roll of Musa the
servant a short time later, the silver spittoon continues to be linked to the disturbing
power of what cannot be spoken. To hide the spittoon in a bed roll, only in the hope
that it will be discovered by its owners — Mary Pereira, burdened with her interference
in Saleem’s parentage (she switched the name tags) framed Musa, to whom she had
shared her secret — leads the novel into questions concerning the constitution of truth,
into the service of falsity in this instance. Hidden from view in a bed roll the spittoon’s
presence falsely accuses Musa. There is a sense in which the space of the spittoon,
despite the possibilities that it generates, is able to be thwarted by forces that would put
it to ill use.
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Interestingly this sense of ill use is not openly condemned in the novel. The
spittoon speaks Musa’s guilt, despite his seeming innocence. The space of the spittoon
thus remains far from utopian, and is in no way presented as a pure site from which an
is that the idealistic egalitarian spaces toward which my suggestions concerning the
spittoon gesture, are fraught with individual interests, differences, struggle. I would
thus suggest that it is not until Mary Pereira hides the silver spittoon in the bed roll that
the spittoon emerges as a truly productive site. This is a site that is marked by an
agonistics rather than a concern for the truth. The spittoon is as much marked by
dispute as consensus. But it is the possibility of dispute, and the possibility of reframing
reality as dispute, that marks the strength of the space of the spittoon. The disturbing
dispute rather than Truth, a space that unsettles neat binary logics — clearly inhabit a
logic that defies the possibility of myths of national unity. The materiality of the social
location of the spittoon defies the radical historical disjunctions that mark myths of
unity, and which are central in Midnight’s Children. I would wish to turn at this point
to consider some of the problems that this defiance of gaps and divisions raises. One of
the most crucial problems that Midnight’s Children engages in, is India’s passage from
The issues that I would wish to raise here, directly relate to my contention that
schemes. In Chatterjee, the nationalist liberation struggle merely effected the structures
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of the colonial which had claimed to have been displaced. In Fanon, Hegel’s slave
failed to provide a metaphor for the struggle of black Africa. In Bhabha, the discourse
Each suggests that the postcolonial emerges in a kind of crises. Colonialism is not dead
and buried, but has merely changed the terms of its rule. We can read Rushdie’s
historical excess much like Fanon’s excessive body, and the spaces of uncontainability
The framing of the first book by Saleem as his history, when in fact the point of
Mary’s burden is that it is not actually his history, can be read as a crucial statement
three, the rug-pulling act of decolonisation — specifically the notion that for Fanon the
emancipation of the colonised peoples, set forth in the guise of simply abolishing the
master/slave dialectic, merely writes them out of an equation that in some sense
character who is increasingly disconnected from history, that we read the novel’s first
book at all. The inclusion of this colonial past in Saleem’s (re)writing suggests that a
postcolonial art draws such a past into its orbit, in order to take up a disturbing location
within the Western imagination. The shift from colonial to postcolonial India, and the
refusal to leave that colonial moment behind, is ultimately a refusal of an Indian history
as British History. If Aadam Aziz had “learned that India — like radium — had been
by the British in no way disrupts what Aziz had learned. Decolonisation actually
becomes a part of that history of discovery, it is thus still the history of the British in
India, the history of their leaving. The comic image of Methwold’s estate, and the
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“little game” of this parting colonial, who insisted that the houses be “bought complete
with every last thing in them”, and “that the entire contents be retained by the new
owners”,510 reveals a desire for the lasting legacy of that history. But Saleem’s
inclusion of a history, perhaps more accurately, histories that are both his and not his,
disturbs the grip of the colonial masters upon the historical. Thus rather than a
reverence for the British Raj’s rule, or even a politics of blame that would evoke a
reverence of sorts, colonial India emerges as a space with its own historical struggle, its
yet at the same time its history is unique to the characters that think, feel, and act both
inside and outside that colonial occupation. Saleem’s narrative in connecting itself with
that past effectively counters the rug-pulling tactic that lies at the core of decolonisation.
To ignore that past, to fail to find a life and energy that in no way reflects the othering
demands of the colonial, would to be complicit with the divisiveness of what Aziz had
learned. This narrative with its magical sites, its sheer excess, occupies a terrain within
the auspices of colonial authority. Such an occupation, just by virtue of the fact that it is
such a binary — Kashmir, the ghetto of Bombay — disturbs the historical assumptions
This is the strange space that Rushdie’s art seeks to occupy. Decolonisation is a
political reality, it represents a historical break, but, like Amina’s Mumtaz, such a break
is politically charged. The parting colonial left with an agenda, rather than withdrew
from one. Rushdie’s difficult narrative thus refuses to allow the break to set up
hierarchical pretensions of colonialism.511 Rather than blot out colonial India the text
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negotiation that the question, ‘who are we’?, is able to be inscribed into a history of
becoming. To deny that becoming as the site for this question is to refuse to
acknowledge the social and historical nature of being, and to plummet into a
conservatism that would champion the cause of an isolated individuality, the heroic
underling that structures Hegel’s Phenomenology. Thus Saleem is exiled from what is
not his, but that what that is not his is inextricably linked to the structures of his
evokes an unforgetting, it is to recognise the trace of the past that continually emerges in
the present as an absence that demands to be engaged with. What is this absence?
Nothing other than the myriad of possibilities that is India, the plethora that deifies by
virtue of its excess the limits of the colonial pretension to historical order. To treat this
historical break as radically discrete rather than a complex of connections and leaks is to
blot out the palimpsest that lays beneath the surface of the face of the new. Thus
Rushdie, in this novel, confronts the reality of the past as it leaks into the present, and
the futility of living in a void that refuses to engage in that leak. Saleem’s impending
plummet into the nothing further happens is inextricably linked to this issue of the
historical leak. To defy the leak is to close down affirmative possibilities in Saleem’s
economy.
We can read this defiance of the leak in the terms that I have set forth in my
reading of the Kantian and the Hegelian sublime. The possibility of unifying the excess
of sensory experience is crucial for reason’s claim to authority in Kant, and in Hegel,
the capacity of reason to unify disparate elements under one principle signals its
authority. The former is subjective, the latter puts the subjective to work in the social
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Rushdie seeks to interrupt the possibility of such a unity with an excess, that can be
The most telling blow upon the refusal to engage in the productive possibilities
of temporal leakage is, as I have suggested, set forth via Saleem’s migration to Pakistan.
Saleem as a midnight’s child, despite being a symbol of new possibilities for the nation,
absurdly plummets into obscurity. His increasing extraction from history, his increasing
sense of unbelonging, signals that rather than new possibilities, he is a sign of the failure
of the nation’s political imagination. Thus this gradual extraction reads like a tale of
innocence lost. From the wide eyed infant who had to be taught how to blink in his
beloved Bombay, too much Bombay — “the city, basking like a bloodsucker lizard in
the summer heat. Our Bombay: it looks like a hand but it’s really a mouth, always
open, always hungry, swallowing food and talent from everywhere else in India”512 —
Saleem plummets into a state of despair. I would wish to map this increasing
disconnection from history with the notion that the mature Saleem ultimately
disconnection at work here there is always already the presence of the past as an
excessive absence. As I have suggested, the text is built upon a tension between a
disconnected and a connected Saleem. And it is in this difficult tension that the political
Through rejection and displacement Saleem as a symbol of the new, the mirror
of the nation, becomes increasingly decentred, removed from Indian national life. In the
context of book two, he doesn’t seem to overcome this specific relation to the nation,
and is constantly frustrated at never being able to actively and literally participate in its
Marxism, as Ahmad perhaps would, but I would contend that it deals specifically with
the time of partition, and with Pakistan’s difficult status as a Muslim homeland. As
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such Saleem’s historical and national identity can only be a negative one. It is doomed
being disrupts the emptying of the time of Pakistan’s birth as a nation. Again Rushdie’s
declares, “it was necessary to cover up Indian history, to deny that Indian centuries lay
just beneath the surface of Pakistani Standard Time”.513 Saleem contradicts what
Pakistan deems about its new beginning. Culturally he is anything but pure. He is
contaminated, a kind of cultural palimpsest that has been written upon by centuries of
subcontinental time.
Thus on the brink of being torn apart by language differences, Saleem attempts
to remain open to the excessive possibilities of centuries of time, rather than the
outlook, Saleem seems to remain history’s victim, rather than its main protagonist, as
the promise of his symbolic national function suggested. The Hindu raised as a Muslim
a similar default, is forced to tread the false boundaries that such oppositions set up. So
instead of the increasing influence of the midnight’s children and the possibilities that
they open up, in a kind of reverse Hegelianism the ‘new’ nation closes them down.
Without Saleem as (re)writer of this history at its edge, this book would mercilessly
Failures
So among the midnight children were infants with powers of transmutation, flight,
prophecy and wizardry … but two of us were born on the stroke of midnight.
Saleem and Shiva, Shiva and Saleem, nose and knees and knees and nose … to
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Shiva, the hour had given the gifts of war […] and to me, the greatest talent of all
In the face of the great hope that the children of midnight promised, such a
pessimism can be understood in terms of the historical connections that the text seeks to
establish. Beginning with the demise of this hope, the mature Saleem seeks to affirm
being as excess. For my purposes, the historical excess that I have connected to the
with its remarkable membership the Midnight’s Children Conference (MCC) promised
the figure of the spittoon. The ability to be able to draw the thought of the nation, that
vast plethora of ideas and feelings into one space and time, had been Saleem’s gift. Yet
remarkably the tale of the MCC, like the nation, is one of division, struggle, and
impossible to even generate discussion concerning what could be the Conference’s sole
purpose. Saleem tells us, “I introduced the Conference to the notions which plagued me
all this time: the notions of purpose, and meaning. ‘We must think,’ I said, ‘what we
are for’”. I would suggest that Saleem is not necessarily calling for a singleness of
purpose in the positive sense here. His unblinking nature, his voyeurism, and the
obvious differences that constituted the Conference, suggest that he sought a strategy of
answers that filled and overflowed the mind of the Conference convener rendered his
religion, cowardice, women’s rights, improving the fortunes of the untouchables, land
claims, political power.515 Thus the MCC ultimately splits and fractures into the image
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of the nation that it mirrored. Driven by the prejudices of the adult world, the hope that
the image of innocence, of becoming, of the future that children engender, disintegrates
Saleem fails to convince the declining Conference that they be a “third principle
[…] the force which drives between the horns of the dilemma”: the duality of masses
and classes, capital and labour, them and us.516 The third principle, Saleem explains,
characterises pre-adult life, and which disturbs the adult pretension to a divisive order.
Children know no boundaries, and are free to explore their world before the imposition
of adult-hood sets in and begins to regiment thought and life. Midnight’s Children is a
plea for an innocent becoming. But such a becoming, as I have suggested, has already
been contaminated by Saleem’s desire for the centrality of the aesthetic in the socio-
political sphere.
Thus, just as Padma foregrounded the politics of inclusion and exclusion, Shiva
opposes Saleem’s call for the artful negotiation of the political in terms that bear a
Saleem’s emphasis upon the productive capacity of undecidability as nothing but elitist
sentiment.
‘No, little rich boy; there is no third principle; there is only money-and-poverty,
and have-and-lack, and right-and-left; there is only me against the world! The
world is not ideas, rich boy; the world is no place for dreamers or their dreams,
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This materialist attack upon what appears to be an Idealism becomes a central concern
complicated by the problem of history that I have suggested is at the core of Saleem’s
‘masterful’ (re)writing. Inhabited by the switched name tags — ‘Shiva’ and ‘Saleem’
had been subject to Mary Pereira’s class based interruption of familial history — the
conflict between them deals directly with Saleem’s ‘disconnection’ from the past.
Shiva’s argument is that Saleem is caught up in a disinterested idea (Kant), rather than
the thing in itself. We can recall Marx and Engels’ opposition to Idealism’s central
re-writing reveals, falls short. For it is not that Saleem has ideologically plummeted
into the false economy of an aesthetic Idealism, it is that his own cultural location —
directly correspond to the interests of European Marxism. It could be that even though
Marxist political strategies formed the basis of Europe’s critique of Imperialism in the
decades after the turn of the century (Lenin’s analysis of Hobson),520 in the cultural in-
a critique fails to be viable. The figure of the spittoon as dispute refuses to allow either
attack. Rushdie’s Saleem is thus not quite an Idealist (the romantic genius) nor an
outright materialist, but something else. The path from the subject to the object, or from
the object to the subject, depending upon the critic’s point of view, remains flawed by
the excesses that render the gaps and the divisions that such schemes depend upon as
highly problematic.
nuances of his work to opened up. Rather than the Marxist/postmodernist battle that
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characterises Rushdiecriticism, Rushdie can be considered in terms of an excess that
demands to be taken up in terms of the politics of material excess — the real that is left
over when unifying teleologies have gone to work — and the contaminations that refuse
propensity for the creative centrality of the Romantic genius? I would suggest that
Saleem’s mastery cannot be understood via such a figure. As Europe’s aesthetic and
status continues to be a site for both celebration and denouncement, Rushdie’s ‘mastery’
from the space of the migrant is not to evoke the mastery of the romantic outsider, it is
to turn away from the centre/margin model that structures the myth of the Romantic
genius, and which finds its way into the domains of postcolonial literary departments.
itself were the centre. Given its productive moment — Rushdie sat down to write
Midnight’s Children as a relative unknown — the argument that Saleem’s mastery can
fallacy. With Rushdie’s own stated resistance to the trope of the artist as outsider,521 I
would suggest that his fiction seeks to escape the dialectical ethic that underpins such
Thus we find that even when Saleem is seemingly totally removed from all
visible forms of a past, utterly dispossessed, the past plummets from the sky out of the
ruins of that dispossession, and, in the figure of the spittoon, strikes him on the head.
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The novel’s second book, which charts the demise of the MCC and Saleem’s gradual
disconnection, concludes with just such a strike. During the Pakistan-India war of 65,
which was driven by the demand for a radical historical disjunction, Saleem writes:
I pick myself up dizzily after the blast, something twisting turning somersaulting
down, silver as moonlight, a wondrously worked silver spittoon inlaid with lapis
back of my head and after that there is only a tiny but infinite moment of utter
present memory time shame and love, a fleeting but also timeless explosion in
which I bow my head yes I acquiesce yes in the necessity of the blow, and then I
There is a certain historical resilience at work here. As I have suggested, this resilience,
this unwillingness on the part of the mature Saleem to be expelled from history,
myth of unity that animates this war. But despite the violent imposition of war, and the
alteration of the landscape that marks any invasion, the historical body remains. The
figure of the spittoon works against Saleem’s emptiness. There is, in this case, a
receptacle of historical being, physical evidence from that obliterated past. Moreover,
the presence of the narrative that precedes this event, like the persistent inclusion of the
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The third book politicises this theme. We find an empty, heedless Saleem,
known as the “buddha”, with his sanity in question, serving the Pakistani military in a
war, from Rushdie’s perspective, between enemies who belong to the same historical
His teeth are stained; betel-juice reddens his gums. A red stream of expectorated
wrought silver spittoon, which sits before him on the ground. Ayooba Shaheed
Farooq are staring in amazement. ‘Don’t try to get it away from him,’ Sgt-Mjr
In this relative obscurity the spittoon remains and signals that despite the intentions on
the part of the Pakistani authorities to empty time and space, to deny the centuries of
Indian history that lay beneath its surface, the past leaks through, this Pakistani Muslim
soldier carries a small piece of his Indianness. It is just such a leakage that redeems and
restores the mature Saleem, and, moreover, opens up questions concerning the
Midnight’s Children re-opens once again the issue of the historical self, and attempts to
define the bridges between the radically displaced Saleem and the reflective, mature
Saleem. Saleem, the Kashmiri/Bombayite Hindu who was raised as a Muslim and who
As a dutiful tracker in the Pakistani military in their war against India, this
journey begins, paradoxically, by way of escape into the realm of dreams. Remaining
torn between two worlds, in a kind of cultural non-space defined only by duty—which
remains no less problematic than his desire for the centrality of the MCC — the
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buddha, (mis)leading three fellow soldiers, flees to the jungle of the Sundarbans. What
duty, took to his heels and fled. Infected by the soul-chewing maggots of
forests.524
It is significant that the spittoon again features as a motif for hope, for the possibility of
historical being across the Pakistan/India divide. Saleem in (re)writing expresses the
distance, as I have suggested, between himself and the character of his narrative, who
remains stripped of history. Total anonymity is the logical conclusion to a self torn
apart by the ravages of a history denied. Its expression is violence, as the buddha knows
no other way than obedience to his military masters. Saleem explains to Padma:
What I hope to immortalize in pickles as well as words: that condition of the spirit
overdose of reality gave birth to a miasmic longing for flight into the safety of
dreams […] ‘I am glad,’ my Padma says, ‘I am happy you ran away.’ But I insist:
not I. He. He, the buddha. Who, until the snake, would remain not-Saleem; who,
in spite of running-from, was still separated from his past; although he clutched,
In the directionless, timeless, seemingly purposeless, and hostile jungle, survival itself
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the chase, which had begun far away in the real world, acquired in the altered light
once and for all. So it was that Ayooba Shaheed Farooq and the buddha
In this disordered space the buddha is bitten by a snake — the scene is a confusion of
Buddhist and Christian iconography — and begins to reclaim “all lost histories, all the
against the threat of nothing further happening, or at least of not being aware that
something happens. The buddha’s articulations thus enact a handcuffing. The only
self-hood. Without a sense of movement or change, and the memories and stories of
such, cultural identity would not be possible. Midnight’s Children contests any notion
that would set forth self-hood as a historyless agent, or which would presume to locate
the enablements of time.528 The anonymous dreamscape of the Sundarbans defy such a
possibility.
Thus as each book marks a division within the text’s architecture, each division
remains far from self-contained. Despite Saleem’s seeming disconnection from the
historical divides that the text’s architecture mark, Saleem’s emergence from the space
of oblivion marks a border crossing. Concealed in a wicker basket with the spittoon by
his side, he escapes from that other partition, Bangladesh, back to India. Again a
dangerous anonymity looms in this situation. The safety of the wicker basket as womb
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tempts Saleem to the oblivion of isolation. But as is characteristic of Rushdie’s texts
generally, this temptation is transformed through the power of anger. Saleem writes:
In the grip of Parvati’s sorcery, I felt my hold on the world slip away — and how
easy, how peaceful not to never return! — to float in this cloud nowhere, wafting
further further further, like a seed-spore blown on the breeze — in short, I was in
nameless dark, I survived. […] I was saved, not only by the glints of a spittoon,
In the context of the border crossings that mark this text, Anger is an understated social
concept. It is either a psychological disorder or a sin. Feminists on the other hand have
cautiously seized its liberatory power.530 For Rushdie too anger generates a series of
works. In Shame the body of the innocent Sufiya, written over by Pakistan’s violence,
erupts to judge the rulers of the nation. In The Satanic Verses Saladin Chamcha
discovers anger and manages to overcome his goat like form, that physicality that
mirrored British nationalist attitudes toward the Indian migrant. In The Moor’s Last
Sigh Aurora Zogoiby dances her anger in the form of a protest, high above the
anger is raised only in order to reveal its limits. The mature Saleem writes his failures
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overcome via the cool detachment of Kantian reason. Anger transgresses the limits of
Reason, it cannot be constrained by the moral sublimity that underpins the authority of
Hegel reveals, where no confrontation is possible. But anger also produces rigid
(the widow). The mature Saleem thus calmly counters his impetuous youthful rage with
a fluid identity, “to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world”.531 The
transformative power of anger thus fades, not in the name of Kantian rationality, but in
the name of excess. Unlike the pain of a wrong, anger lifts the feeling that can’t be
phrased above and beyond and makes a demand for a determinate judgement.
The closed space of the wicker basket, as a repeated metaphor, becomes a womb
for a rebirth of sorts. This cyclical pattern characterises this narrative text: birth, the
desire for historical centrality, the demise of that desire, seeming obscurity, rebirth.
One constant remains: the figure of the spittoon, that marker of historical processes. In
the third book, however, Saleem’s anger engenders the desire for centrality in the
nation’s affairs that had been thwarted before. In this instance he attempts to join the
public service. But again the possibilities that such a social location afford are denied.
He returns to the magicians slum, to finally lose everything, even the sliver spittoon that
accompanied him throughout this cyclical process. Indira crushes the resistive space of
the magicians ghetto. With the loss of his wife, Pavarti-the-witch, as a consequence of
Indira’s purge, Saleem announces a nostalgia for the spittoon. I would suggest that this
316
I was consumed by nostalgia for my bulldozed spittoon. Picture Singh had
although I used this to entertain my son with my expertise in the gentle art of
spittoon-hittery, sending long jets of betel-juice across the grimy air of the
magicians’ colony, I was not consoled. A question: why such grief over a mere
Khan’s underworld into a second Taj Mahal; gathering dust in an old tin trunk, it
sensitive person could not fail to sympathize with me in my nostalgic agony at its
loss?532
How should we understand this nostalgia? Several interrelated factors intervene in our
textual space as less India’s Truth, than the presentation of truths, for India’s
marginalised voices, the stories from the slums, and the underworld invade the text with
their own histories. In this context this multiplicity disrupts the telling of historical
Truth, or as Linda Hutcheon puts it, “we now get the histories (in the plural) of the
losers as well as the winners, of the regional (and colonial) as well as the centrist, of the
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unsung many as well as the much sung few, and I might add, of women as well as
men”.533 The postmodern form thus enables alternative histories to be presented, and
this gives rise to the notion that there can no longer be a privileged voice in historical
But history here, despite this postmodern revision, remains representation. Does
this signal an end to the totalitarian injustices that the postmodern seeks to demolish? I
would like to argue, in contrast to the version of the postmodern that I have touched
upon here, that this faith in the power of language to present its object is just as
bend an argument Derrida made against Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation, the rule
that represses the silent.534 In other words repression does not simply take place in
I would wish to argue that the space of the spittoon, as I have outlined in the
current study, presents a marked departure from the postmodern revision of history.
fails to account for the border crossings, the contaminations, the unrepresentable
moments within representation, that are played out in Midnight’s Children. I would
suggest that these sites of excess can be understood as the postcolonial sublime. The
text closes with the image of Saleem teaching his adopted son (Shiva is his father) the
art of spittoon-hittery. Such a scene is staged in and against the knowledge that Indira’s
quest to delete the midnight’s children had not been totally successful. There remains a
Saleem thus leaves his son a legacy, thirty glass jars filled with chutney and one jar that
is empty. It is in this context that Saleem’s nostalgia is staged. He leaves his son not
318
with a prescription, as the postmodern rejection of nostalgia implies, but with a
nostalgia for the possibility of India as an excessive cultural space. Significantly, the
relation of the empty jar to the thirty full jars thwarts Lyotard’s thesis. Given the
presence of thirty full jars, the implication is that the empty jar doesn’t occur in
isolation. It is not an event in the Lyotardian sense that demands invention. Its filling
can only be undertaken in relation to the excess, the too much, that the thirty full jars
represent. Despite its emptiness there is a sense in which it has already begun to be
filled, already contaminated by Saleem’s nostalgia for the Indian Palimpsest. The
empty jar is not connected causally to the others, nor is it isolated. This means that its
the unpresentable. The future contents of the empty jar will only be able to be
understood in relation to the excess — thirty other jars — that it is unable to present.
History for Rushdie is thus not a matter of finding a space for representation, it is a
matter of articulating the unpresentabilities that lay beneath and which leak into its
surface.
I have attempted to read Rushdie in terms of what I have called the postcolonial
sublime. Several interrelated issues have emerged. Firstly, the excess of history
presented in the novel can be understood as a critical moment in which the impossibility
of cultural unity is powerfully staged. Rushdie’s texts stage uncontainable material sites
Secondly, Rushdie’s texts are deeply engaged in the postmodern question. In defending
his work against Ahmad’s claim that he has been seduced by a postmodern
material terms. What this means is that Rushdie actually raises the issue of historical
responsibility: what can be done with too much history? Such a question emerges as a
polemic against a nationalist violence that is preoccupied with myths of cultural and
319
historical purity. The sublime excess that Rushdie opens up demands that the question
insistence upon difference can be located at the edges of Rushdie’s work, I would
contend that ultimately the materiality of the excess, and the impossibility of breaking
free from this excess, signals that the pure event that lies at the critical core of Lyotard’s
postmodern sublime does not adequately describe Rushdie. For Rushdie the sign of
culture and history is overfull, rather than an empty question mark. Finally, I have
the chapter by turning to consider the disruptive capacity of Rushdie’s literature in the
Ahmad’s judgement, which fails to take the political possibilities of excess into account,
Romanticism and the politics of Rushdie’s art. But when it comes to Rushdie’s stated
aims concerning art, he is decidedly anthropomorphic. The subject is the source, and
total controller of human destiny. For Rushdie there are no ultimate guiding principles
outside the human will, history, politics and religion are merely the manifestations of
this. This idea can be traced to Ludwig Feuerbach’s assertion that human beings ‘are
what they eat’, and that religion is a human invention. For Feuerbach God is a
by taking this imaginary construction and demanding devotion to it, rather than working
to overcome the shortcomings which led to the construction in the first place. This is
320
argued in the influential work, The Essence of Christianity, which seeks to demystify
God, the upshot being the notion that human beings can only become free through
thought.
It is easy to see the influence of such ideas in the contemporary world. Rushdie
is one among many who has consciously or unconsciously adopted Feuerbach’s view of
The dream is part of our very essence. Given the gift of self-consciousness, we
can dream versions of ourselves, new selves for old. Waking as well as sleeping,
live in our pictures, our ideas. I mean this literally. We first construct pictures of
the world and then we step inside the frames. We come to equate the picture with
such, makes violence in the name of truth seem ludicrous. The constructed nature of
truth, for Rushdie, disrupts the authority, and legitimacy, of such claims. If we all
recognised the unfixed and constructed nature of our truths we would be less willing to
defend them violently, and more open to new ideas. Rushdie thus buys into
dogmatism. He announces, the “elevation of the quest for the Grail over the Grail itself,
the acceptance that all that is solid has melted into air, that reality and morality are not
givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins”.537
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Interestingly, Rushdie describes this condition as a ‘postmodern’ one, citing
emphasis upon overturning grand narratives, which is Lyotard’s project, is crucial in his
understanding of the function of art and literature, and the role of the artist in today’s
world. Even though the discourse of the postcolonial shares the same object as the
postmodern, I have contested the critical capacity of Lyotard (in chapter four of the
thesis), and I would argue that ultimately Rushdie does too. For Rushdie art, more
specifically literature, is the medium which is at the forefront of this project. Art
imagine, or as Rushdie puts it in defence of The Satanic Verses, to “see the world
anew”.539 People, he writes, “understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing
and challenging and questioning and saying the unsayable; not by bowing the knee,
whether to gods or to men”.540 Literature thus has an overtly political function, one
which provides space for the effectuation of social change. Rushdie’s project is
indicative of Karl Marx’s reading of Feuerbach, and the declaration, “the philosophers
have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”.541
Rushdie’s writer is thus faced with a unique task in this revolutionary project.
The task involves articulating new versions of the world in order to set captives free
from the constraints of totalitarianism. The path that such a political gesture, if we were
He writes:
literary criticism then sets to work to demonstrate that he or she is really no more
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impossible for a writer to stand in any regimented line, is a quality novelists share
with the Caped Crusaders of the comics, though they are only rarely capable of
Rushdie’s writer is a kind of super hero, exceptional being, a genius who has, somehow,
not only managed to break the moulds that constrain the rest of us, but also has
managed to find a form for this, in order to bring refreshment and newness to our lives.
Perhaps there is room here for piety toward these ground breaking heroes. Rushdie’s
Rushdie, the writer, is the modernist creative genius, ‘who can do nothing but write’.
These terms are utilised by Farrukh Dhondy in defending Rushdie’s work. He writes,
the fatwa is “the most desperate and fearful threat ever laid on the life of an innocent
man trying to do, quite brilliantly, what he conceives of as his metier, something he
This notion shows its true colours in Rushdie’s defence of the novel as a sacred,
if not holy, form. He contends that the function of literature is analogous to the function
of religion. This means that literature is an absolute necessity in a world which has
forgotten God. Literature is the medium which fills the godless vacuum. Rushdie
writes:
Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to
capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for
a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god
Among these basic human needs Rushdie includes: the need to understand why life
makes us feel so small, and subsequent need to know that despite this we have been
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destined for something; the need for answers to the unanswerable, such as, how did we
get here?; and the need for codes to live by. In the past these needs were met by
religion, now, given the decline of belief in grand narratives, literature has been forced
into this space. The writer thus deals with these most human questions, and provides,
for the discerning reader, as Rushdie puts it, “explanations of the heart”.545
The implication here, as I see it, is that the world can’t do without literature or
art if it is to move beyond, what must be, its current unjust and stagnant state. Literature
is a specialised domain which deals with the issues of life, with the true ‘essence of
consider it. It follows that such an important domain needs to be preserved and
constraints and articulating ‘newness’, which is an integral part of our human identity.
The right of writers to freely express ideas is crucial, given the importance of art in
Rushdie’s economy.
The reason for ensuring that privileged arena is preserved is not that writers want
the absolute freedom to say and do what ever they please. It is that we, all of us,
readers and writers and citizens and generals and godmen, need that little,
imprisoned, or art will die, and with it, a little of what makes us human. 546
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But despite the Romantic artistic heritage that inhabits these well worn lines, and
Rushdie’s unexplained keenness for the Eighteenth Century, “the great century”547 as he
put it, there is a disjunction, a disturbing ‘not quite’ at work here. Rushdie ultimately
fails to mirror the Romanticism that began in eighteenth-century British aesthetics, and
which was crucial in myths concerning the glory of empire. Caught in a conception of
the sublime as elevation, eighteenth-century aesthetics carved out a space for the heroic
outsider. Rushdie’s heroic status is marked by the almost but not quite that Fanon
announces and Bhabha seizes (as I showed in chapter five of the thesis). As I have
argued, in its excesses Rushdie’s work contaminates the totalising teleologies of the
Western imagination.
Just as Rushdie feels uncomfortable with the tag, “Indian-born British writer”548
— which has similar overtones to the colonial formulation that Twinings of London
employ to promote their English Breakfast Tea: “A blend of Ceylon and Indian teas,
Romantic artist doesn’t quite match V. S. Naipaul’s.549 This is because, unlike Naipaul,
scandalous at work in his fiction. The arrival, for instance, of Gibreel Farishta to the
shores of Britain parallels the Norman Conquest. As Rosa Diamond watches the ghosts
of Britain’s past, “the Norman fleet had sailed right through this Englishwoman’s
‘Rise ’n’ shine! Let’s take this place by storm’, Turning his back on the sea,
blotting out the bad memory of in order to make room for the next things,
passionate as always for newness, he would have planted (had he owned one) a
flag, to claim in the name of whoknowswho this white country, his new-found
land.551
325
This image of the migrant as conqueror has been aptly celebrated by Uma
Parameswaran.
coming into their own, and I see them going further — I see them taking over
immigrant and Asian wombs will outnumber, out-think and outshine the others
and take over. Not an unfit retribution for the races that have annihilated
aboriginal cultures and peoples in five continents over the past five hundred
years.552
thought and the object of thought, it is a state of privation, a lack, a want. The sublime,
as I have shown in my engagement in Kant (in chapter two of the thesis), is a term
linked to the West’s desire for elevation, detachment, a pure domain for Culture, Art,
and Society. The sublime is that oppositional moment, in which the self faced with
reason, and thus rise above the perils of nature, or the onslaught of the perceived enemy.
The momentary possibility of the breakdown (in every sense of the word) of the
capacity of reason, the pain that attends to this moment, is accompanied by the pleasure
obstacles, has been a crucial component in the Western myth of progress (Hegel). But
something has happened. The postcolonial subject, once the object of the colonial, now
returns as a greater force, one that poses a threat to the authority of Reason (Kant). But
326
it is not a threat that finds its base in an equal and opposite force. As Gibreel Farishta
claims the land in the name of “whoknowswho”, the discourse of the postcolonial can
be understood as a force which contaminates and upsets the capacity of Reason, and the
myth of cultural purity. Rather than perpetuate the space of the genius, Rushdie writes
in the name of an intense dissatisfaction against that space. If the lowly were able to
seize the space of victimage in order to legitimate a case in the myth of European
progress (as Fanon acknowledged and rejected), the in-between self exceeds such
spaces, and is rendered a scandalous disturber rather than a contributor to the romantic
ethic that is at the core of the conservative myth of progress. Rushdie’s ‘too much’
Rushdie’s metaphors such as, ‘hand-cuffed to history’, joined by elastic bands, the
freedom from the auspices of cognitive authority, this emphasis upon a connection to
historical excess disturbs any sense of history as ethical progress. We can understand
this disruption through excess, in political terms, as an opening up of the ‘how’ in the
question: ‘how do we judge history?’ Such a questioning by its very nature defies
essence. With its emphasis upon being connected to too much, Rushdie’s excess, rather
than give grounds for abdicating social and political responsibility, demands a
driven by the affirmative capacity of the excess. Its logic begins with an excess, and
upon the pure narrative of progress loses its validity. The art of the postcolonial
Rushdie exceeds the actualities of the colonial imagination: India has always been,
327
can understand the political nuances of this excess through Uma Parameswaran’s claim
that Rushdie ultimately disrupts the Western imagination from postcolonial space.
racism is so insightful, so excellent”, she writes, “that one tends to think that he is
Rushdie’s fiction occupies that muddy space between the real and the free play
of the imagination. His work is at once unreal in its reality and real in its unreality.
This is not to suggest that his fiction refuses to deal with the real and becomes
completely detached and unreal, or that the unreal itself is a new and more legitimate
referential, or the symbolic function of art, and the imaginative possibilities that are
opened up in that referential play.554 I would suggest that this artistic location, neither
What can be said about this referential play? The migrant intellectual in this
instance deals with history, specifically a history that has been structured in the West’s
imagination through the trope of the heroic struggle of the outsider/underling. Rushdie
too buys into the myth and describes his relation to this imagination through the protest
elastic bands’, falling, ‘nailed’. But ultimately these are metaphors that enact a
connection to an excess that disturbs the ethical limits of the Western myth of progress.
Rushdie thus writes from a critical space that squarely faces the West. His is a looking
back, but such a critical direction as it opens up history as excess, undoes the past as it
has been constructed in the Western imagination. Rushdie utilises the tools that lay
within the Western imagination, only in order to disrupt, to disturb. Rushdie is the devil
within the Western fold, that contamination that the West struggles to look at. Forced
by the demands of unifying teleologies, where there must remain nothing that is unable
328
to be accounted for, the West must look. But such a look is accompanied by the
nagging thought that Rushdie is nothing other than a prince of darkness. Who is
Rushdie as ‘one of the West’s own’ we find a hesitation, a moment that Todorov calls
the fantastic. There is something about Rushdie that cannot be articulated in terms of
postcolonial sublime, that cannot be accounted for. Thus we can think Rushdie as a
disturbance to the West’s ethical imagination. In its excess his work gestures toward
the possibility of newness without knowing what that newness is, as Saleem’s empty
chutney jar testifies. Rather than utopian visions, his is a disturbance that opens up the
Notes
438
Søren Kierkegarrd, Fear and Trembling, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 61.
439
Harveen Sachdeva Mann, “‘Being Born Across’: Translation and Salman Rushdie’s
The Satanic Verses”, Criticism, vol. 42, no. 2 (1995), 290.
440
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of the Postmodern: History, Theory, Fiction (London:
Routledge, 1988), 161-164.
441
Jean M. Kane, “The Migrant Intellectual and the Body of History: Salman Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children”, Contemporary Literature, vol. 37, no. 1 (1996), 112.
442
I would contend that the metaphor of the suffering exiled artist has remained a
constant factor in ‘Rushdiecriticism’. It would be tempting to argue that the Satanic
Verses Affair marks a shift in the critical reception of Rushdie, but such a shift has not
taken place. The affair merely intensified that sense of the outsider/underling artist that
has been utilised by critical work on Rushdie since it began.
443
Dieter Riemenschneider, “History and the Individual in Salman Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children and Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day”, Kunapipi, vol. 6, no. 2
(1984), 61-62.
444
In contrast see the English Journal, which, in its editorial entitled “Children of
Modernism”, vol 81, no 1 (1992), 98-99, utilises the trope of the postmodern to
329
universalise Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. The editorial declares, “Saleem is a
quintessential postmodern. By extension, he represents us all. All children of the
twentieth century are Midnight Children — our students as well as their teachers” (98).
445
Jean-Pierre Durix, “It Was So, It Was Not So”, in A Shaping of Connections:
Commonwealth Literature Studies — Then and Now: Essays in Honour of A. N.
Jeffares, ed. Hena Maes-Jelinek, Kirsten Holst Peterson, and Anna Rutherford (Sydney:
Dangaroo Press, 1989), 226.
446
Satish Aikant, “Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: The Middle Ground of
Diaspora”, in Interrogating Postcolonialism: Theory, Text and Context, ed. Harish
Trivedi and Meenakshi Mukerjee (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, 1996),
213-220.
447
Paul Gray, “East, West (book review)”, Time, vol. 145, no. 3 (1995), 1.
448
Pico Iyer, “After-Raj Tales”, Times Literary Supplement (30 September 1994), 23.
See also Albert Camus’ interesting article on Oscar Wilde, “The Artist in Prison”, trans.
Antonia White, Encounter, vol. 2, no. 3 (1954), 26-29. He writes, “Wilde realised that,
in wanting to divorce art from suffering, he had severed one of its roots and thus cut
himself off from real life. ... Now that he wore the livery of a convict, he knew that he
had dragged beauty down to sub-human level, since such art conveys nothing to those
who are deprived of everything. ... But the sorrow and joy in King Lear or War and
Peace can be recognised by all who pine in our houses of injustice. Nothing could
console him now but the great voice of genius which transforms man’s common pain
into glory” (27-28).
449
Tom Wilhelmus, “Between Cultures”, The Hudson Review, vol. 49, no. 2 (1996),
318.
450
Sadik Jalal Al-Azm, “The Importance of Being Earnest about Salman Rushdie”, in
Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. D. M. Fletcher
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 257.
451
Samir Dayal, “Talking Dirty: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children”, College
English, vol. 54, no. 4 (1992), 435.
452
Dayal, “Talking Dirty”, 434, 435.
453
Aijaz. Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 155.
454
Ahmad, In Theory, 6.
455
Ahmad, In Theory, 139-141.
456
Ahmad, In Theory, 150, 155.
457
Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (London: Merlin Press,
1963), 21.
330
458
Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”, in Collected Papers, trans. Joan
Riviere (New York: Basic Books, 1959), vol. 4, 161.
459
Ahmad, In Theory, 151.
460
Ahmad, In Theory, 155.
461
Ahmad, In Theory, 155.
462
See Syed Shahabuddin, “Yes, Mr Rushdie, We Shall Not Permit Literary
Colonialism, Nor Religious Pornography”, Impact International, vol. 18, no. 21 (1988),
17-18. See also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (“Reading The Satanic Verses”, Public
Culture, vol. 2, no. 1 (1989), 87-88) who contends that the Indian parliament’s decision
to ban the book was not a religious one, but a ‘rational abstraction’ to ease the tension
between racial groups. See also Midge Decter’s, “The Rushdiad”, Commentary, vol.
87, no. 6 (1989), 18-23.
463
See M. M. Ahsan, and A. R. Kidwai, Sacrilege Verses Civility (Leicester: The
Islamic Foundation, 1991), 25-60. See also S. Akhtar, “Holy Freedom and the
‘Liberals’”, Impact International, vol. 20, no.4 (1990), 10.
464
Spivak, “Reading The Satanic Verses,” 91. For alternative readings: Daniel Pipes,
“The Ayatollah, the Novelist, and the West,” Commentary, vol. 87, no. 6 (1989), 9-17;
Alex Knonagel, “The Satanic Verses: Narrative Structure and Islamic Doctrine,”
International Fiction Review, vol. 18, no. 2 (1991), 69-75; A. Ali, “The Westernisation
of a Nice Muslim Boy”, The Universal Message, vol. 12, no.10 (1991), 25-32; and M.
A. Anees, The Kiss of Judas: Affairs of a Brown Sahib (Kuala Lumpur: Quill
Publishers, 1989).
465
Anthony Close, “The Empirical Author: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses,
Philosophy and Literature, vol. 14, no. 1 (1990), 248-267.
466
“Right to be Read”, The Daily Telegraph (17 January 1989), 16. For a useful
critique of this consumerist defence, see Aamir Mufti, “Reading the Rushdie Affair: An
Essay on Islam and Politics”, Social Text, no. 29 (1991), 95-116.
467
“Race, Religion, Rushdie”, The Times, July 25, 1989, 15. See also Clifford Longley,
“A very British Lesson Muslim’s Must Learn”, The Times (8 July 1989), 12; and his
“Rushdie to the Rescue”, The Times (29 December 1990), 10.
468
Rushdie, Shame, 69.
469
Ahmad, In Theory, 141.
470
Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley
Bereton and Fred Rothwell (London: Macmillan and Co., 1911), 20.
471
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. J.H. Bernard (London: Macmillan
and Co., 1914), 54-55.
472
Kant, The Critique of Judgement, 67, 165.
331
473
Kant, The Critique of Judgement, 81.
474
Kant, The Critique of Judgement, 170.
475
Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, 19.
476
It is significant that potentiality does not appear in Hegel’s controversial
considerations upon art. Potentiality is the principle that governs development,
specifically philosophical development. In Hegel’s thought art precedes religion, and
ultimately reaches its absolute manifestation, via a synthesis with religion, in
philosophy. Art is limited (poetry, as opposed to painting and music, is situated in this
regard) because it “destroys the fusion of spiritual ideality with external existence” (The
Philosophy of Fine Art, vol. IV, 16). Art in its most complete form — poetry —
resides merely on the side of the Ideal in this system. Lukács’ use of the concept in this
context suggests, contra Hegel, that he considers art a philosophical, and ultimately a
political, form of expression.
477
G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane
and Frances H. Simpson (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co.,1892) vol. 1, 20-
21.
478
Hegel’s critique of Kant in The Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (London: Allen
& Unwin, 1969), 51, is also applicable here. Hegel argues that there is no distinction
between the I that thinks and the concepts, for the I is only (self)realised in the act of
thinking. The I doesn’t precede the concepts as Kant presupposed. Similarly this also
means that there are no objects which precede the act of thinking. The object
presupposes I as I presupposes the object, there is no sharp distinction. What is
important is that the self comes to be realised only in relation to the object. Both are
realised simultaneously. It is this lived relation that is crucial in both Ahmad’s, and
before him, Lukács’ aesthetic considerations.
479
On this point I follow Tim Brennan’s, “Review: Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory”, Textual
Practice, vol. 8, no. 2 (1994), 327-335. He writes: Ahmad “cannot bring himself to
grant the double-edged nature of history — its creativity and its powerful discomfort
with specific forms of power, not only its evanescence and pretence” (328).
480
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Pan Books, 1982), 9.
481
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 448.
Joseph Addison, The Spectator (no. 418, Monday June 30), (1712, reprint. Oxford:
482
332
486
Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 4.
487
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 9.
488
Jean-François Lyotard, “The Sublime and The Avant-Garde”, in The Inhuman, trans.
Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991),
99-100.
489
Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 59.
490
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 10.
491
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 9.
492
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 45.
493
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 39, 40, 46.
494
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 39.
495
See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge Mass.:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1968). See also Philip Engblom’s “A
Multitude of Voices Carnivalization and Dialogicality in the Novels of Salman
Rushdie”, in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. D.
M. Fletcher (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 293-304.
496
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 44.
497
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 62-63.
498
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 63.
499
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 47.
500
Rushdie, Shame, 16.
501
Rushdie, Shame, 54.
502
Rushdie, Shame, 261.
503
Rushdie, Shame, 191-195.
504
Rushdie, Shame, 48.
505
Rushdie, Shame, 261.
506
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 146.
507
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 66, 68, 69.
508
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 66.
333
509
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 11.
510
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 95.
511
Sarah Saleri, “Contraband Histories: Salman Rushdie and the Embodiment of
Blasphemy” (The Yale Review, vol. 78, no. 4 (1990), 604-624), in similar terms situates
Rushdie on the borders of both devotion and sacrilege. His ‘blasphemous’ work — The
Satanic Verses — must evoke both and neither categories at once, in order to undertake
disturbances to the space of rigid faith. The upshot reveals the difficulty in rigidly
locating Rushdie’s work.
512
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 125-126.
513
Rushdie, Shame, 87.
514
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 200.
515
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 228.
516
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 255.
517
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 256.
518
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 255.
519
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. R. Pascal, trans. W.
Lough and C. P. Magill (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1938), 15.
520
See Vladmir Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1966); and J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (1902, reprint. London:
George Allen & Unwin, 1968).
521
Salman Rushdie, “Salman Rushdie”, Lateline, Australian Broadcasting Corporation,
n.p., 1994.
522
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 343.
523
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 348.
524
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 360.
525
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 360.
526
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 363.
527
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 365.
528
For an interesting contrast to the historical connections in Rushdie, see Marcel
Proust, Time Regained, trans. C. K. Scott Moncreiff, Terrance Kilmartin, and Andreas
Mayor, in Remembrance of Things Past (New York: Random House, 1981), vol. 3, 709-
1107.
334
529
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 381-382.
530
See Mary Valentis, Female Rage: Unlocking its Secrets, Claiming its Power (New
York: Carol Southern Books, 1994).
531
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 383.
532
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 448.
533
Linda Hutcheon, A Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), 66.
534
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1978), 35.
535
Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (New York: The Continuum
Publishing Company, 1990).
536
Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta, 1992), 377-378.
537
Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 422.
538
Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 422.
539
Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 393.
540
Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 394-395.
541
Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”, in Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the
End of Classical German Philosophy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1946), 68. Marx
champions Feuerbach’s work as it performs the dissolution of the religious world into
its secular basis, but goes on to argue that Feuerbach fails to see that religion is the
product of social relations.
542
Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 426.
543
Farrukh Dhondy, cited in The Rushdie File, ed. Lisa Appignanesi, and Sarah
Maitland (London: Fourth Estate, 1989), 183.
544
Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 421.
545
Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 421.
546
Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 429, 396.
547
Una Chaudhuri, “Imaginative Maps: Excerpts from a Conversation with Salman
Rushdie”, Turnstile, vol. 2, no. 1 (1990), 37.
548
Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 67.
549
See for instance Rushdie’s review of Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival. “V. S.
335
Naipaul”, in Imaginary Homelands, 148-151. He writes, “All this is evoked in delicate,
precise prose of the highest quality, but it is a bloodless prose. The idea that the British
have lost their way because of ‘an absence of authority, an organization in decay’, that
the fall of the manor encourages ordinary folk ‘to hasten decay, to loot, to reduce to
junk’, is an unlikable, untenable one” (150-151).
550
Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 129
551
Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 131.
552
Uma Parameswaran, “The We/They Paradigm in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses”, in
Us/Them: Translation, Transcription and Identity in Post-Colonial Literary Cultures,
ed. Gordon Collier (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992), 198-199.
553
Parameswaran, “The We/They Paradigm in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses”, 193.
554
See Uma Parameswaran, “Salman Rushdie’s Shame: An overview of a Labyrinth”,
in The New Indian Novel in English: A study of the 1980’s, ed. Viney Kirpal (New
Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1990), 121-130; Kumkum Sangari, “The Politics of the
Possible”, Cultural Critique, no. 7 (1987), 157-186: Patricia Merivale, “Saleem
Fathered by Oskar: Intertextual Strategies in ‘Midnight’s Children’ and ‘The Tin
Drum’, Ariel, vol. 21, no. 3 (1990), 5-21.
336
Conclusion
This mapping of the discourse of the postcolonial can proceed indefinitely, since
culture and nation. Aijaz Ahmad argues, on the contrary, that the supposed
discourse of the postcolonial. Not able to embrace Ahmad’s hope for a ‘proletarian’
(Bhabha), in order to play with and upon the game of reason obliquely. It is not by
some ideological conspiracy that the discourse of the postcolonial takes up Western
reason as both its strategy and its object. The pervasive Idealism of Kant and Hegel is
The insecurity of Western reason — empirical vertigo and the threat of madness
in Kant, the impossibility of system in Hegel — can, however, serve to reveal what
might be called the object of the discourse of the postcolonial. For it is clear that the
objectivism of what could be called Ahmad’s Marxism. This attempt is realised in the
and its location both inside and outside Hegel’s phenomenology, in Bhabha’s discursive
infrastructures, which seek to alter the course of colonial desire, and in Rushdie’s
These thinkers have one crucial thing in common: they all return to the scene of colonial
domination in order to set forth a politics of excess to combat the teleological desire of
337
philosophy, we have seen how excess plays a vital role in establishing the authority of
postcolonial thinkers seek to exploit this crises, to push it beyond its structured location
in Idealism. They aim not at system building, but at transgressing the infrastructures of
Is there not, in sum, a resolve to take up excess, the sublime, to perform such a
task? The Kantian sublime makes sense only as a colonial metaphor. This is why there
becomes the stable ground upon which knowledge can securely travel. The sublime as
excess is thus a threat to a secure knowledge, and when tamed, as Kant and Hegel
attempt, it becomes a symbol of the power of reason. But this attempt to tame the
sublime is fraught with difficulty. The Kantian sublime as a colonial metaphor is able
the excessive residues that remain embedded within such systems is disruptive of the
colonial claims that have been enacted in its wake. This is the postcolonial sublime.
sublime. Into the confident nobility of Kant’s dialectical play upon the sublime, there
bursts the based and the lowly, who are, despite being excluded from the progress of
history, creative beings. Fanon’s celebration of the black body thus emerges as a
creative force that questions the authority of the Western pretension to the systematic.
the destination of reason’s teleology. Where Hegel confesses — “I was fully conscious
... of the inherent difficulty of the subject matter and of its exposition ... I have tried
after many years ... to remedy this imperfection [and] feel I still have reason enough to
338
claim the indulgence of the reader”555 — and proceeds with confidence, Fanon’s black
body, rooted as it were in the excesses of material desire as situated inside Hegel’s
sublime beyond its limits, its location in the construction of the authority of reason. The
infrastructures, mimicry, sly civility, subaltern agency, and hybridity open up spaces of
excess in order to disturb the assumed power of the colonial gaze. Each arises in the
form of an obligation, but the untranslatable excess that is produced in the dissemination
of colonial authority contaminates and alters the destination of that authority. Such
spaces thus take on the disturbing character of the postcolonial sublime. Where colonial
desire is reason’s teleology, for Bhabha the sublime is the material real that is unable to
In the excessive play of Rushdie’s fiction we also find a play upon the Kantian
sublime. Bursting with possibilities, his fiction, rather than define and demystify in the
classical Marxian sense, ultimately opens up the question of politics. One of the most
striking things about the spaces from which life is staged in his texts, is that they all
leak. The textual spaces that presuppose the fixed boundaries that give rise to Ahmad’s
despair, are spaces that collapse, spaces of the uncontainable. But it is precisely this
accent upon leakage that constitutes the possibility of a politics that disrupts the
Midnight’s Children inserts itself into the everyday world of the pleasure and the power
of gossip and the telling of stories, the space of the spittoon, and seeks to speak the
Like all gossip it is a politics that is delicious and yet disturbing. And, in the context of
reason’s teleology, it is a politics of excess that pushes Kant’s quaint musing upon the
339
I have linked each of these thinkers to the anxiousness that emerges in the
critical tension between Kant and Hegel. In this tension there is an unsettling, a
upon Kant’s incomplete Idealism, the postcolonial sublime arises when this
in the discourse of the postcolonial, I have shown that it is precisely the uncontained,
that which exceeds the limits of unifying teleologies, that can be considered both the
object and the subject of the discourse of the postcolonial. In effecting a politics that
disturbs the Western myths of unity and cultural purity, the excess of the postcolonial
goes to work upon the Kantian sublime and wrests it from its dialectical location in his
architectonic system.
But the question is whether the postcolonial sublime can be understood in terms
phrase as an empty question mark that demands to be dealt with. The discourse of the
questioning, and then proceeds to affirm this excess. If Lyotard championed the event
as a lack, the discourse of the postcolonial opens up the material real as a site of too
much.
It is clear that the fruitfulness of the discourse of the postcolonial lies in its effort
to exploit the anxiousness that lies at the core of Western reason. Any engagement with
it clearly must take place on this basis. The appropriation of the sublime moment as
both material excess and a rhetorical strategy — to the extent that the ambivalent
eclecticism without theoretical depth — meets the demands of the time very well. And
if I concur with Bhabha’s return to Fanon in order to access the ‘dark side of man’, it is
340
because postcoloniality seems to signify the possibility of disrupting the increasing
Notes
341
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