Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Contents
Nikita Dhawan
Introduction ...............................................................................................
I. Entangled Legacies
Nikita Dhawan
Affirmative Sabotage of the Masters Tools: The Paradox of
Postcolonial Enlightenment....................................................................... 19
Karin Hostettler
Under (Post)colonial Eyes: Kant, Foucault, and Critique ......................... 79
Jamila M. H. Mascat
Hegel and the Black Atlantic: Universalism, Humanism and Relation ..... 93
Mara do Mar Castro Varela
Uncanny Entanglements: Holocaust, Colonialism, and
Enlightenment ........................................................................................... 115
II. Transnational Justice
Ulrike Hamann
A Historical Claim for Justice: Re-configuring the Enlightenment for
and from the Margins ................................................................................ 139
Sourav Kargupta
Feminist Justice Beyond Law: Spivakian Ab-Use of Enlightenment
Textuality in Imagining the Other ............................................................. 153
Jorma Heier
A Modest Proposal for Transnational Justice and Political
Responsibility............................................................................................ 177
Anna Millan and Ali Can Yldrm
Decolonizing Theories of Global Justice .................................................. 195
Contents
Introduction1
Nikita Dhawan
The intellectual and political legacies of the Enlightenment endure in our
times, whether we aspire to orient ourselves by them or contest their claims.
Whenever norms of secularism, human rights, or justice are debated, we are
positioning ourselves vis--vis the Enlightenment, which provides important
intellectual, moral, and political resources for critical thought. Immanuel
Kants dictum, Have courage to use your own reason! succinctly captures
the Enlightenment claim of emancipation through the exercise of reason. In
the face of feudality, violence, prejudice, and subservience to authority, the
Enlightenment intellectuals enunciate ideals of equality, rights, and rationality
as a way out of domination towards freedom. Contesting traditionalism, authoritarianism, and the legitimization of social inequalities, the Enlightenment, it is claimed, inspired radical movements like the French and Haitian
revolution, while influencing progressive political thought including liberalism and socialism. Enabling a critical reflection on political norms and practices, it has fostered the accountability of institutions, equality before law, and
the transformation of social relations. Emancipatory movements for suffrage,
abolition of slavery and civil liberties can all be traced back to the Enlightenment, even as it continues to inspire contemporary social and political
movements. The Enlightenment idea of individual rights and dignity, it is
believed, enables the exercise of political agency and expands individual
freedom.
However, as has been pointed out by both scholars of Postcolonial Studies
as well as Holocaust Studies, Enlightenments promise of attaining freedom
through the exercise of reason has ironically resulted in domination by reason
itself. Along with progress and emancipation, it has brought colonialism,
slavery, genocide, and crimes against humanity.
Against this background, the present volume engages with the contradictory consequences of the Enlightenment for the postcolonial world. In the past
decades, there has been a spate of revisionist historiography that attempts to
recuperate imperialism as a virtuous exercise. The ideological distinction
drawn between good, responsible and evil, irresponsible imperialism in
recent accounts emphasize its positive force to highlight the benefits of
empire. These glorifying narratives disregard the coercive context in which
Europeans emerged as ethical subjects in the guise of redeemers of the
backward people and dispensers of rights and justice. The fact that Europe
1
A special thanks to Johanna Leinius and Anna Millan for their support in preparing the
manuscript.
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Nikita Dhawan
drew and continues to draw profits from the surplus extracted from its former
colonies is conveniently ignored in these accounts. International systems that
emerged at the end of colonialism create and ensure global inequality. The
fruits of modernization have been accompanied by systematic pauperization.
The aim of the present volume is to question the hollow myth of the Enlightenments long march to freedom and emancipation. However, instead of
a polemical dismissal of the Enlightenment, the effort is to conceptually reposition its role in processes of decolonization, even as the Enlightenment itself
must be decolonized. This is not a simple task of undoing the legacies of the
Enlightenment and colonialism; rather it is a more challenging undertaking of
reclaiming and reconfiguring the fruits of the Enlightenment. The various
contributions in this volume address diverse aspects of colonialism and its
enduring economic, cultural, social, and political consequences both for the
global North as well as the global South. The four sections of the volume deal
with key issues of the entangled legacies of the Enlightenment and colonialism, transnational justice, human rights, and democracy from a postcolonial
feminist perspective. On the one hand, the various contributions engage with
the allegation that discourses of transnational justice, human rights, and democracy are ideological expressions of a coercive will to power of the global
North. On the other hand, they investigate how these Enlightenment concepts
can function as aspirational ideals while providing evaluative criteria to critically assess our socio-cultural, legal, and economic practices. By exploring
the orchestrating and regulative effects of Enlightenment norms as well as
their emancipatory and coercive dimensions, the aim is to delineate the challenges in decolonizing Enlightenment. This opens up space for social and
political interpretations as well as contestations with the aim to overcome
inequalities and injustice in a postcolonial world.
In Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000: 5) argues that almost by definition postcolonial thinkers are obliged to engage with abstract
and universal categories that were forged during the Enlightenment and inform the theorizing of historical, social, and economic phenomena in the
postcolonial world. It is not so much the European origins (Genese) of the
norms of human rights or democracy that compromise their validity (Geltung), but much more the normative violence (Butler 1999: xx) that is exercised on those who violate the hegemonic definitions of these norms. Postcolonial theorists seek to retain these norms, which opens up possibilities of
negotiation, appropriation and transformation of these norms, while contesting their Eurocentric bias. As Chakrabarty (2000: 4) argues, political modernity, with its ideas of citizenship, the state, civil society, the public sphere,
human rights, the rule of law, democracy, popular sovereignty, social justice,
scientific rationality, and secularism is a legacy of the Enlightenment thought
and history. It is inadequate, but nonetheless indispensable in understanding
the postcolonial condition. At the same time, the postcolonial world is not a
Introduction
11
12
Nikita Dhawan
lines Jamila Mascats chapter Hegel and the Black Atlantic. Universalism,
Humanism and Relation connects Hegel to the Black Atlantic. However,
in contrast to exploring the influence of the colonial world on European
thinkers, she investigates the reception of Hegel, particularly The Phenomenology of Spirit, in French-Caribbean scholarship. Focusing on the works of
the three Martinican writers Aim Csaire, Frantz Fanon, and Edouard Glissant and their appropriation of Hegel for anticolonial thought, Mascat analyses the literary-philosophical cross-fertilization that occurred between Hegel and the Black Atlantic.
Efforts to link colonialism and the Third Reich are perceived as a provocation by a number of scholars, especially by historians. In her contribution
Uncanny Entanglements: Holocaust, Colonialism and Enlightenment Mara
do Mar Castro Varela argues that thinking together the gruesome atrocities
committed during colonialism and the Third Reich would help develop a
more nuanced and deeper understanding of the relation between colonialism,
the Holocaust, and the Project of Modernity. Drawing on the writings of
Theodor Adorno and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the chapter explores the
role of education in the aftermath of historical violence in envisioning nondominant futures.
The second section of the volume engages with the issue of historical and
contemporary justice from a transnational perspective. Ulrike Hamanns contribution A Historical Claim for Justice Re-configuring the Enlightenment
for and from the Margins focuses on Mary Church Terrells visit to Berlin in
1904. Daughter of former slaves and member of the womens suffrage
movement in the USA, Church Terrell was invited to deliver a talk on The
Progress of Colored Women at the International Womens Congress,
where she was the only woman-of-color participant. In contrast to her bourgeois white German colleagues who did not have access to higher education
on account of their gender, Church Terrell had a college degree, but nonetheless experienced blatant forms of racism in the US as well as in Germany.
Against the background of three intersecting contexts, namely, the European
feminist movement, post-slavery USA, and German colonialism, Hamann
analyses Church Terrells efforts to re-configure the Enlightenment ideal of
progress by inscribing hitherto excluded subjects such as Black women into
discourses of emancipation and rights.
Sourav Karguptas chapter Feminist Justice Beyond Law: Spivakian AbUse of Enlightenment Textuality in Imagining the Other engages with
Spivaks reading of Kants Critique of the Power of Judgment in the form of
an affirmative deconstruction. Spivaks reading retrieves the figure of the
native informant as a mark of a violent expulsion that the Kantian text performs in thinking its central subject. This nuanced reading is unmistakably
postcolonial in its intimate undoing of the Enlightenment textuality. However, in a related move Spivak shows that the eruption of the native inform-
Introduction
13
ant, as a supplement that the text desires and yet denies, persists in the postcolonial text as well, this time as the effaced figure of the subaltern woman.
This insistence in persisting with the work of deconstruction, even at the cost
of questioning the very ground of a postcolonial critique as discourse of
man, positions Spivak not merely outside the average paradigm of the postcolonial fabric, but also configures a deconstruction which is more open to
the notion of the persistent work of feminist justice. Kargupta argues that such
critical labor of feminist deconstruction might point toward a new configuration of reason that is aware of its necessary constitution as a generality, and
yet remains attentive to eruptions of singular and located gendered moments
which may both disrupt and inform it.
Despite increasing research on transnational justice in contemporary critical scholarship, there is a marked absence of the examination of historical
injustice in the form of colonial exploitation, violence, and domination,
whose legacies persist in the postcolonial world. Drawing on the writings of
Iris Marion Young and Joan Tronto, Jorma Heiers essay A Modest Proposal
for Transnational Justice and Political Responsibility, presents an account of
transnational justice that problematizes privileged irresponsibility. Moving
beyond territorialized understanding of justice that limit the commitment to
justice within the nation-state, Heier addresses the history of colonialism,
structural injustice, and epistemic ignorance to present a postcolonial feminist
account of transnational justice. She proposes that Uma Narayans idea of
methodological humility and Spivaks notion of learning to learn from
below offer possibilities of reconfiguring the asymmetrical relation between
the dispensers and receivers of justice.
Along similar lines, Anna Millan and Ali Can Yldrm critically engage in
their contribution Decolonizing Theories of Justice with the Eurocentric
framework of liberal theories of global justice, in particular with the writings
of John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum. Examining the violent exclusions and
elisions operating within these theories of justice, Millan and Yldrm seek to
shift the focus to the position of subalterns, who are most strongly affected by
global injustices. Supplementing mainstream theories of justice through postcolonial-feminist insights like Spivaks reflections on the ethics of responsibility, Millan and Yldrm aim to trace the silencing and marginalization of
subaltern groups, especially subaltern women, in global theories of justice. To
undo subalternity demands a different practice of representation that will
allow disenfranchised individuals and groups to make claims and emerge as
subjects of rights.
The third section of the volume explores the postcolonial critique of human rights discourses. Human rights, in mainstream theories, are considered
as a gift of the European Enlightenment to the world. The rights narrative is
commonly constructed chronologically from the English Bill of Rights in
1689, through the US Declaration of Independence in 1776, and to the Decla-
14
Nikita Dhawan
ration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1788 emerging from the
French Revolution. According to this narrative, these declarations reached a
culminating point in 1948 with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
and the subsequent generations of rights. Julia Surez-Krabbes contribution The Other Side of the Story: Human Rights, Race, and Gender from a
Transatlantic Perspective shifts the focus from Europe to the Americas, from
the era of Enlightenment to the late fifteenth-century discovery of the
Americas to provide an alternate account of how human rights discourse not
only took white male subjectivity as the norm, but was crafted to protect the
Spanish colonizing elites. In light of this analysis, Surez-Krabbe urges a
legal and political reconsideration of the emancipatory assumptions of contemporary human rights discourses.
Judith Schacherreiters chapter Propertization as a Civilizing and Modernizing Mission: Land and Human Rights in the Colonial and Postcolonial
World deals with the emergence of property as a human right in Europe,
which occurred in the historical context of the propertization of soil. Backed
by theories of natural law and the legal philosophy of the Enlightenment, the
Western understanding of property was universalized through colonialism,
while communal land usage, as practiced by peasants in pre-capitalist Europe
and by the indigenous population in the Americas, was disqualified as premodern and primitive. Applying the theories of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Enrique Dussel and Edmundo OGorman to Mexican agrarian history, Schacherreiter argues that the universalization of property contains a colonial way of
thinking that is inherently biased against communal forms of land usage,
which are viewed as mere anachronisms. However, if propertization constitutes an attack on the commons, then taking the commons seriously would
mean contesting the universalism of property in the era of neocolonialism.
Chenchen Zhangs essay Between Postnationality and Postcoloniality:
Human Rights and the Rights of Non-citizens in a Cosmopolitan Europe
examines the tensions between postnational articulations of EU membership,
both in terms of normative expectations and institutional construction, and the
post/neocolonial politics of citizenship and migration in todays Europe.
Revisiting the Arendtian critique of human rights and questioning the problematic construction of the subject of human rights and of the citizen, Zhang
examines how EU citizenship continues to reproduce differential inclusion
and an essentialist cultural identity at the supranational level. Zhang argues
that neither institutional nor morality-based versions of cosmopolitanism can
sufficiently account for the political implications of European migration politics that reinforce the gap between the universal human and the national citizen.
The doctrine of cultural relativism is frequently employed to explain ethical systems that diverge from the Enlightenment consensus of universalized
morality. Designating ethical practices as culturally relative was hitherto
Introduction
15
16
Nikita Dhawan
Bibliography
Buck-Morss, Susan (2009): Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Butler, Judith (1999): Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
10th ed. London: Routledge.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000): Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
I. Entangled Legacies
Nikita Dhawan
Given the plurality of perspectives encompassed under the label of the Enlightenment, Sankar Muthu (2003: 265) suggests that an exhaustive definition that could fully capture this diversity is impossible. He proposes a negative definition of the Enlightenment based upon what enlightened thought is
against, namely, orthodox understandings of religious doctrine and traditional
understandings of state power. This move refrains from limiting the vibrant
intellectual period of the Enlightenment to a singular meaning or common
project. Anthony Cascardi (1999: 21) remarks that the term Enlightenment
simultaneously designates a historical epoch as well as describes a conceptual
paradigm. A critical engagement with the Enlightenment entails a historical
analysis of the modern world even as it examines the nature of reason itself,
with the antinomy of history and theory making Enlightenment a site of an
impasse (ibid).
Going into the historical context in which the question What is Enlightenment?1 was posed against the backdrop of discussions on censorship,
political authority, and religious faith, James Schmidt (1996: 2) unpacks how
despite the differences in the response to this question, one common feature
was that none of the respondents to this question understood it in terms of a
particular historical period. Instead of scrutinizing claims of living in an enlightened age (ibid: 17), Kant [1784], whose essay became canonical, was
1
20
Nikita Dhawan
principally concerned with the political and not the historical aspects of the
question. Schmidt (1996: 5) argues that Kants focus was principally on tracing the publicness of reason that marked this period. With the flourishing of
coffee houses, salons, reading societies and scientific academies, reason went
public. The public use of reason2 was closely linked to the autonomy of the
individual, which led Kant to recommend that under no circumstances should
it be restricted. This was one of the cornerstones of Enlightenment political
thought.
Schmidt (ibid: 29) faults thinkers who try to approach the original question and responses in terms of drawing generalizations about the Enlightenment project and its legacies for our age. According to him, the respondents
to the question What is Enlightenment sought to explain a process and not
define a period. Contemporary critics of the Enlightenment are accused of
taking as their point of departure some current problem, like totalitarianism or
the ecological crisis, and linking it causally to the Enlightenment legacy of
instrumental reason and the rise of discourses of individual rights over the
ethics of duties. While Schmidt rejects approaches that blur the difference
between defining the Enlightenment and evaluating the various projects it
allegedly championed, he nonetheless perceives as legitimate the question of
what counts as Enlightenment and the demands it elicits from us.
In light of the recent discussions in both political thought as well as postcolonial studies on the contradictory legacies of the Enlightenment, the aim of
this chapter is to provide an overview of the different positions in this debate
to unpack the strengths and weaknesses of the various arguments. Beginning
in the first section with the critics of the Enlightenment, most notably the
scholars of the Frankfurt school, postmodernists, feminists, and postcolonial
theorists, who point to the pernicious consequences of the Enlightenment, the
second section moves on to the defendants of the Enlightenment, who hope to
bring to light the long neglected anti-imperialist impulses of eighteenth century political thought, with particular focus on German Enlightenment. The
third section takes stock of the simultaneously imperialist and anti-imperialist
nature of the Enlightenment. I propose that while postcolonial theorists risk
homogenizing the Enlightenment by primarily focusing on its violent legacies, advocates of eighteenth century political thought do not adequately
consider the postcolonial-feminist critique in their efforts to recuperate Enlightenment thought. The fourth section deals with one of the core questions
that brings together postcolonial and Enlightenment scholarship, namely, the
role of critical practice in transforming social and political relations. The
concluding section addresses the ambivalent relation between postcolonialism
and European Enlightenment, and the challenge this sets up for politics in the
postcolonial world.
2
Feminists point out the gendered nature of the public versus private distinction on which the
Kantian understanding of the public and private uses of reason rest.
21
Many argue that the best account of the consequences of the failure of the Enlightenment
project is to be found in the work of Nietzsche (see MacIntyre 1981, Garrard 2004). Accusing Kant as an enemy of the Enlightenment, Nietzsche called for the denouncement of the
entire eighteenth century political thought.
22
Nikita Dhawan
23
is what Foucault calls the classical episteme, the distinctive way in which
knowledge was conceived, ordered and constituted in the eighteenth century.
It must of course be borne in mind that Enlightenment philosophers like
Kant have been acutely aware of the ambivalent nature of reason, which is
why he does not limit his critique to the Church and the State, but applies it to
reason itself (ONeil 1990: 187188). As Kant explains, the Enlightenment is
an expression of rational will, an exit from self-incurred tutelage (Kant
1977c: 53). The radical social change promised by the Enlightenment is
premised on the exertion of the will to empower ourselves and to transform
social realities. Two key distinguishing features of the Enlightenment are its
claim to freedom to reason and to criticize rather than to think and act in
accordance with external authority. Private uses of reason are partial and
tempt us into obedience (ibid: 53), in contrast to which the public use of
reason is exercised by men of learning (ibid: 55). Autonomous thinking and
acting follows principles of reason that is against both subservience and arbitrariness. However, Kant repudiates any individualist interpretation of autonomy, in that he argues that a solitary individual cannot expect to escape immaturity; rather, autonomy in thinking is always intersubjective and exercised through the public use of reason. He claims that, for the emergence of
an enlightened public, the freedom to make public use of ones reason is more
significant than political reform (ibid: 5556). The Kantian categorical imperative, as principle of autonomy, is a matter of acting only on principles
that could be chosen by all, that is, on maxims which can be willed as universal laws. The only obstacles to freedom and emancipation are cowardice,
laziness, or restrictions on the public use of reason, which must be overcome
(Kant 1974: 51).
This brings us to the other defining characteristic of the Enlightenment,
namely, its universalizing4 ambitions, most clearly expressed through its emphasis on universal principles, which all human beings assumedly aspire to
irrespective and independent of their race, class, gender, sexual orientation,
religion, and nationality. These universal principles are neither contingent nor
negotiable, so that they are undeniable by any rational person independent of
particular times and places. Proponents of the Enlightenment aspire to speak
rationally and objectively about the world as a whole and to establish the
legitimacy of knowledge by means of the systematic separation of value from
fact (Cascardi 1999: 90). As has been repeatedly pointed out by its critics, a
common malady of the Enlightenment is its attempt to divorce reason and
cognition from experience, intuition, and affect. It was contrary to the goals
of enlightened critical thinking to derive the laws that prescribe what ought to
4
Universalism, for Kant, involves determining whether a particular maxim can be consistently taken up by everyone else or whether one is required to make an exception of oneself, and
thus apply a rule to oneself that cannot, without contradiction, be willed by others.
24
Nikita Dhawan
be done from instances of what actually is the case (ibid: 8384). To derive
values from the world of fact would leave us with impure and unreliable
forms of value contaminated by interested egoism.
The move to subject reason to critical inquiry has raised concerns about
whether attempts to criticize reason would result in nihilism (ibid: 52). In
response to such doubts, Kant reiterates his faith in reason, understood as
autonomy in thinking and in action, to overcome conflicts and bring about
lasting peace (ibid: 192). However sceptics nonetheless highlight Kants
admiration for Frederick the Great, who asserts: Argue as much as you like,
but obey! as proof of Enlightenments ambivalent relation to political freedom.
Another significant challenge to the Enlightenment model of emancipation
comes from postcolonial studies.5 The Enlightenment claim of having overcome barbarism in Europe, justified its spread to the uncivilized nonEuropean world. The rational ideal of the Enlightenment and its accompanying idea of progress set up a singular, universal goal for humankind, namely,
indefinite improvement and development. Its stadial view of history justified
colonialism on the grounds that through contact with Europe, savage and
barbarian populations could advance to higher stages of development (cf.
McCarthy 2009). Differences between European and non-Europeans were
explained in terms of historical, geographical, social, cultural, political, and
economic factors, which could be overcome if the non-European world accepted the European model of civilization as the blue-print for its future.
Colonialism was the way to overcome backwardness, whereby the guidance
and support of the Europeans would guarantee a positive social, economic,
and political outcome.
Inspired by the Frankfurt School and the poststructuralist critique of the
Enlightenment, postcolonial theorists emphasize the profound interconnection
between Europes imperial ventures and the Enlightenment veneration of
reason, science, and progress that made possible the very thinking of the
world as a unified whole. These world-knowing and world-creating strategies were at the heart of European colonialism. Imperialist ideologies were
successful in translating their provincial understanding of knowledge, norms,
values, and ideals into explanatory paradigms with universalist purchase. The
universalizing project of Enlightenment imposed a uniform standard of instrumental reason, privileging European conceptions of knowledge and institutions. The Enlightenment reform of legal, administrative, and economic
policy in the colonies, instead of ushering in freedom and equality, opened a
5
Festa and Carey (2009: 7) remark that the terms postcolonial and Enlightenment share a
kinship to the extent that both simultaneously describe a period, a kind of political order, a
cluster of ideas, a theoretical purchase point, and a mode of thinking. Both terms are historical breaking-points that mark political and epistemic shifts, in that they are both modes
of oppositional critiques informed by a plurality of local instantiations (ibid).
25
new chapter of the history of domination. It introduced practices of subjectification, surveillance, regulation, and discipline. Attempts at enlightened and
humanitarian reforms regularly resulted in the increased control over the
individuals in whose name these reforms were carried out. As argued by David Scott (1999: 35), colonialism produced not just extractive effects on colonized bodies, but also governing effects on colonial conduct.
Although the focus has primarily been on time, it is important to bear in
mind that the Enlightenment association with and embeddedness in the geographical region Europe is a decisive aspect of its self-consciousness. From
this perceived center, the Enlightenment thinkers began to theorize the
peripheral parts of the world, comparing their own societies and cultures
with the rest of the world. Colonialism was the age of discovery, when the
Europeans claimed to have found new worlds by bravely encountering
cannibals and savages (Hulme 1990: 20).
Not being great travelers did not deter the Enlightenment thinkers from
theorizing and judging other societies. Although few of them had direct experience of the colonies, several worked closely with private and state bodies
that were responsible for formulating the colonial policies of European powers. Relying on travel literature, ethnographic sources, and literary accounts
they assessed and judged the moral, political, social, and economic practices,
institutions, and traditions in America as well as Asia and Africa. At the heart
of the Enlightenment idea of history was the notion of progress of mankind
from savagery to civilization, based on a complex developmental model
with Europe on top of the civilizational pyramid. For instance, in his reflections in Leviathan [1651], Thomas Hobbes draws on events in the Americas
to substantiate his claim that the state of nature is savagery (Hobbes 2003:
103). In his view, the savages hold a mirror up to the reality of human
nature; they show the frightening image of a society bereft of those attributes
which make it civilized (Hulme 1990: 24). Hobbes proposes that the state of
nature is a state of war, thereby legitimizing the eventual acceptance of an
ultimate earthly authority, namely Leviathan, who will guarantee peace and
order. The implied relationship between Europe and America becomes apparent in this metaphorical map of the world where the former symbolizes civilization and the latter savagery (Hulme 1990: 25). The language of development and the metaphor of maturation deem the natives inferior to European
standards. Or, in John Lockes famous words: in the beginning all the world
was America (2003 [1689]: 121).
Colonial discourse was the epistemological corollary to colonial violence:
It authorized Europeans to construct and contain the non-European world and
its people by defining and representing them as racially and culturally inferior. By constituting them as objects of European knowledge, the colonial subjects perspectives were disqualified and devalued. The universalist agenda of
colonial discourse laid the foundations for the ideological justification of
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Nikita Dhawan
27
proved the lack of sovereign status of the natives and was part of the ideological justification for the colonial appropriation of non-European territories
and wasted natural resources (Hulme 1990: 2830). The nomadic practices
of some natives were judged inferior to sedentary forms of life. The threat of
masterless men justified enclosure and expropriation. The idle and unproductive natives, it was argued, were ignoring the divine gift of land to humanity, even as the unwillingness to use ones labor was an indication of moral
failure and lack of exercise of reason. The focus was on the industriousness of
Europeans, who appropriated land through their labor and consequently contributed to the public good while pursuing their private interests. For instance,
for Locke (2003: 116), the central division is between those who improve
land and those who, like animals, merely collect what nature provides; only
the former are fully rational and therefore fully human. Here labor and reason
is inextricably linked and characterize the difference between savage and
civilized societies (Hulme 1990: 2830).
The propertization and exploitation of land, forests, hills, and other natural resources was at the heart of capitalist expansion. European land-use practices became normative, with the enclosure of common land into private
property being monopolized by the colonizers. The scarcity of land in Europe
was solved through the colonial theft of indigenous lands in the name of the
rational use of land. The colonizers increasing demand for land provoked
native resistance, which in turn led to reprisals justifying the forfeiture of the
natives right to their land (Hulme 1990: 20). In an ironic reversal, the European settlers became the legitimate inhabitants, while the original inhabitants
were driven from their own territories. The colonizers deployed the legal
doctrine of vacuum domicilium6 to acquire land titles and political jurisdiction, disregarding the sovereignty of indigenous populations. Any resistance
to this theft led to colonial terror: not the Hobbesian war of all against all, but
the war of the righteous against those they perceived as attacking rational
principles of land ownership and land use. The language of just war was mobilized to legitimize imperial aggressions towards the natives in the name of
self-defense (Anghie 2007: 2426).
Against this background, the universal aspirations of the Enlightenment
and its faith in the power of reason are undeniably tainted by this history of
terror and violence. Enlightenment self-representations as harbinger of progress and emancipation are countered by postcolonial interrogations and the
analytic of suspicion (Scott 2004: 178). Frantz Fanon highlights this historical irony as follows:
Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere
they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the
globe (Fanon 1961: 251).
6
28
Nikita Dhawan
May Schott fails to specify that she is focusing exclusively on European women, thereby
reproducing the universal category women.
29
Kants remarks on womens character occur both in Anthropology (1983: 255, 261) as well
as in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1992: 3940, 54) (cf.
Kneller 1993, 1996, May Schott 1996: 474).
30
Nikita Dhawan
through thought alone. Their interpretation of the Enlightenment and its consequences represent a pervasive disenchantment or world-loss (Cascardi
1999: 3). Enlightenments efforts to emancipate mankind have resulted in
death and destruction. While overcoming superstition, the instrumentalization
of reason makes it a tool to whatever power that deploys it (Schmidt 1996:
21). Colonialism and the Holocaust are testimonies to the fact that despite the
Enlightenment or maybe because of it, emancipatory ideals are tainted (Cascardi 1999: 4). In contrast to the Hegelian idea of subjective selfconsciousness that continuously evolves into some higher or more complex
form, Enlightenment self-consciousness, in Adornos and Horkheimers view,
is self-canceling in that it is haunted by that which it excludes and represses
(ibid: 24). Freedom and domination are deeply entangled, even as Enlightenment rationality refuses to acknowledge its implication in such a dialectical
process (ibid: 25). It assumes an absolute and omnipotent stance over and
against its objects, only to reinforce the very conditions it had set out to overcome (ibid: 25).
Re-enchantment of Enlightenment
Most of the significant scholarship on Enlightenment either ignores colonialism or treats it as marginal to the more important issue of recuperating the
Enlightenment (Hampson 1968, Krieger 1970, Yolton et al. 1991, Outram
1995, Gay 1996, Schmidt 1996, 2000, Porter 2001, Himmelfarb 2004, Dupre
2004, Bronner 2004, Louden 2007, Headley 2007, Todorov 2009, TrevorRoper 2010). Even critical thinkers like Adorno, Horkheimer, and Foucault
disregard colonialism in their critique of the Enlightenment. For instance, the
erasure of the Haitian Revolution, one of the most significant appropriations
of the Enlightenment principles, within the mainstream history of ideas indicates the inability and unwillingness of the European intellectual tradition to
recognize the agency of Others (Fischer 2004). Paul Gilroy similarly problematizes the omission of slave experiences from accounts of modernity (Gilroy 1993).
Against this background, there has been an encouraging development in
the last decade in the scholarship on eighteenth century political theory, in
that there has been a concerted effort to address the connection of the Enlightenment to European colonialism. A number of publications (Muthu 2003,
Festa/Carey 2009: Levy/Young 2011) seek to provide a corrective to what
they claim is a misrepresentation of the Enlightenments epistemological
investment in imperialism. Recovering critical perspectives, they highlight
subversive operations at work particularly within eighteenth century European political thought. Both the post-modern as well as the postcolonial critique
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clare native lands as res nullius (no mans land) and seize them. They even
upheld the rights of the natives to defend their interests and presented the
New World inhabitants as fellow cultural beings (ibid: 275). Muthu argues
that Diderot, Kant, and Herder rejected the belief that European norms and
values were universal standards to compare and rank non-European peoples
and cultures (ibid: 275). In fact they were suspicious of the very notion of
civilization, emphasizing moral incommensurability and cultural difference
(ibid: 280). Condemning the Bengal Famine of 17691770 as well as the
transatlantic slave trade as instances of European immoralities abroad, Diderot attacked European colonial rule as unacceptable. Rejecting the ranking of
peoples on a civilizational scale, Herder too advocated respect for cultural
differences. Along similar lines Kant, in Muthus view, abandoned his earlier
views of racial hierarchy in favor of cosmopolitanism and humanity in his
later writings (cf. Kleingeld 2007).
Like Muthu (2003), Daniel Carey and Sven Trakulhun (2009: 240) propose that universalism remains one of the most contentious features of Enlightenment thought. One of the main criticisms against Enlightenment universalism is that it is accused of negating cultural diversity. For instance, the
very notion of man as a universal category emerges through the exclusion
and marginalization of those who cannot or will not confirm to its normative
force, such as woman or the native. While sexual and racial difference is
implicit in subject formation, the assumption of a common human nature or
essence overlooks the power effects of these gendered and racialized inflections. The impulse to universalize claims of reason, rights, and sovereignty in
order to substantiate a shared human nature or fashion history in a grand
narrative of progress has been targeted as exclusionary and violent. This
critique refutes claims that the Enlightenments universalizing tendencies
represent a liberating force.
Muthu (2003), Lynn Festa and Carey (2009), and Carey and Trakulhun
(2009) endeavor to convince us that Enlightenment universalism does not
disallow diversity to flourish and that in fact knowledge about other cultures
and peoples in the age of discoveries strengthened the awareness of cultural
diversity, which in turn contributed to the emergence of cosmopolitan perspectives. They recommend a more nuanced reading of the writings of Enlightenment thinkers before judging their faults. They contest the claim that
Enlightenment ideals naturalize one particular political model as a universal
telos and propose that these can be reconciled with difference without automatically perpetuating racism.
In their view, one of the best examples that repudiates charges of relentless universalism is the Enlightenment tolerance of religious difference.
Lockes Letter Concerning Toleration [1689] is presented as a prime illustra-
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The flow of goods, ideas, and people across borders, in Kants view, made a
theory of cosmopolitan justice (ius cosmopoliticum, Weltbrgerrecht) imperative. This did not concern just sovereign states or particular commercial
entities, but humanity as a whole. Kant employs Verkehr to refer to trade and
Wechselwirkung to describe the communicative and interactive functions of
10
Interestingly Locke excluded Catholics and Atheists from his doctrine of toleration.
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justice is a peaceful community even as he does not rule out rivalry and antagonism in his conception of global relations (ibid). His idea of unsocial
sociability encourages productive resistance in the interest of selfpreservation and not conquest. Thus friction and tensions must be balanced
against commercial and communicative connections (ibid: 230).
Global commerce was thus perceived to be a double-edged sword (ibid:
211). Debt and war-making were central issues in Enlightenment debates
about transnational commerce. Kant argues that perpetual peace can only
exist if no state increases its national debts to finance wars. Close commercial
connections among states would motivate international conflicts to be resolved through mediation (ibid: 222). Instead of short-term profit, the power
of money lies in avoiding a global debt crisis and financial collapse (Kant
1977b: 226). Kant tempered his celebration of commercial humanity with
concerns about transnational commercial domination, acknowledging the
dangerous link between imperial domination and self-domination, between
oppression abroad and moral and political corruption within (Muthu 2012:
207). Diderot and Smith believed that the end of the corrupting influence of
global commerce and international trading companies must come from outside Europe. The rise of non-European nations would lead to more equitable
global economic relations, not through mutual friendship, but through mutual fear (ibid: 214). Ironically they argued that this non-European anticolonial resistance would be enabled because of global commerce and communication, namely as a result of processes that produced injustice. The nonEuropean world was in their view humanitys hope for the future (ibid: 212).
Muthu claims that the contemporary tendency to attack the Enlightenment
and its justification for modern market-oriented commerce ignores the critical
approach to commerce that many eighteenth-century thinkers deployed in the
course of analyzing and assessing the rise of global commerce in its multiple
forms (ibid: 4). He emphasizes that, for instance, Diderots and Kants critical
arguments against the coercive effects of global commerce are neglected
because they irritate standard narratives that only highlight their celebration
of global commerce (ibid: 16).
Another interesting claim made by Muthu is that in contrast to eighteenth
century political thought, prominent political philosophers of the nineteenth
century like John Stuart Mill, Hegel and Marx explicitly defended European
rule over non-European peoples (2003: 259). Muthu contends that with the
rise of the language of race and nation in the nineteenth century, Enlightenment anti-imperialist thought was marginalized (ibid: 279). One of Muthus
strongest claims is that popular nineteenth century political discourses of race,
progress, and nation are projected back into the eighteenth century, leading to
a misrepresentation of the Enlightenment. Contrary to popular belief, he identifies a return to pre-Enlightenment imperialist sentiments in post-Enlightenment scholarship, with eighteenth century political thought offering a rup-
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39
tory becomes episodic, with historical time divided into tradition and modernity, stagnation and development, superstition and the triumph of reason. The
authoritarian irrationality of the East was a sign of oriental despotism and
immoral feudalism, which proved that the Orient occupied a lower stage in
the evolution of modernity. Eastern political systems were seen to deny the
possibility of rationality and freedom and thus the development of individuality. The legitimization strategy of colonialism as a civilizing mission and the
dynamic of difference between civilized and barbaric societies conceded
the possibility of the natives becoming civilized, but, of course, guidance by
the Europeans was necessary. This was the infamous colonial pedagogic
project of helping backward societies to overcome their civilizational
infantilism (Mehta 1999: 70). Thus refuting the biology is destiny doctrine, imperial liberalism upheld the capacity for civilization of the natives.
It was argued that some societies are at a lower stage of evolution and have to
be educated like children to make them capable of enjoying freedom. The
political incompetence of the colonized could be corrected through colonial
education and the correct form of government that would enable them to
realize their civilizational potential. This offered the natives the possibility to
overcome the stage of rawness (Rohigkeit) that is marked by instinct and
develop requite capacities to reason and thereby exercise freedom and consent, which is central to the legitimacy of political authority. And those who
are not in the position to reason and exercise consent may be governed without their consent (Mehta 1999: 59).
Liberalism rests on the promise that all human beings are born equal and
free and strives toward universal suffrage and self-determination. However,
while human nature was understood to be equal by birth, it was nonetheless
marked by difference due to peoples differing capacities. This justified the
subjugation of some by the others, who became gate-keepers to privilege.
Political inclusion was contingent upon the qualified capacity to reason. This
resulted in the pedagogic obsession to instruct the natives in learning to reason. Lockes Some Thoughts Concerning Education [1693] is almost like a
manual, ranging from toilet training to instructions about what should be
consumed at what time of the day, how to treat servants and others of lower
rank appropriately, and how to temper ones emotions. And although the
capacity to reason is natural, the emphasis is on how rationality must get
inculcated (Mehta 1999: 6061). Liberalism is a project of breeding civility,
with education becoming a process of initiation. Although we are born free,
we are really free only when we learn to exercise the rationality necessary for
political inclusion. Reform is central to the liberal political agenda and involves the process of realignment, an impulse to better the world (ibid: 62).
At the same time, liberal fantasies of reforming and civilizing the Other were
accompanied by the fear of the reformed, civilized Other who would make the
colonial project of civilizing the uncivilized redundant (Bhabha 1994).
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pation (ibid: 250). However, feminist writers seldom highlighted the similarities between the woman-child analogy and the barbarian-child analogy, or
challenged the exclusion of colonized adults because of their supposed immaturity. The idea of backward colonial subjects participating in their own
governance was considered absurd (ibid). This indicates the tenuous relation
between anti-imperialist thought and Western feminism.
Moral worth was measured for instance through literacy, which legitimized access to political participation. Mill rationalized unequal political
power not only in terms of differing political competence, but on the basis of
peoples unequal worth as human beings. As Pitts points out, he insisted that
the franchise was a responsibility and privilege to be earned and not a universal right (ibid: 161). Mill characterized the English working classes in similar
terms he used to describe the semi-barbarous people of India: they were
subservient to custom and superstition and unappreciative of progress and
innovation (ibid: 162). Here one detects interconnections between exclusions
within Europe and in the colonies. Mill proposed that colonial governments
could not be held accountable to their subject populations; that progress must
be imposed by appropriately trained civil servants (ibid).
Interestingly both Tocqueville and Mill later voiced concerns about the
moral and political perils of imperialism. They were cognizant of the violence
involved in European conquests, even as they were confronted with the hypocritical nature of their theories (ibid: 255). There was increasing anxiety about
the ability of colonial rulers to govern the people they did not respect or understand. Thus, even as liberalism alleged to be politically inclusionary, it is
deeply linked to the empire and the political disenfranchisement of the colonized, even as it claimed to empower them.
43
it a singularity of purpose and unity of ideas. Dipesh Chakrabarty in this context remarks that the Enlightenment is an imaginary figure that remains
deeply embedded in clichd and shorthand forms in some everyday habits of
thought (2000: 4). Along similar lines, Neil Lazarus claims that The concept of the West [] has no coherent or credible referent. It is an ideological category masquerading as a geographic one (2002: 44). It is argued that
instead of viewing the Enlightenment as a monolithic and coherent ideological project with unequivocal goals, the tensions within the historical era and
intellectual formation must be attended to. Festa and Carey (2009: 2) lament
that the postcolonial critique of the Enlightenment has been ad-hoc and
haphazard. They further state the demonization of a concept [] makes it
more coherent than it really is (ibid: 15).
Festas and Careys critique of the non-systematic nature of postcolonialism neglects that it is necessarily eclectic, borrowing from post-structuralism,
Marxism, feminism, and psychoanalysis, disciplines that in turn are influenced by Enlightenment thought. Postcolonialism is not only transdisciplinary, but also anti-disciplinary in that it challenges systematic theorybuilding. It has been suggested that the postcolonial attempt to combine
Marxist and post-structuralist insights is like riding two horses at the same
time, to which the Indian historian Gyan Prakash (1992: 184) remarks let us
hang on to two horses, inconstantly. Methodological purity can only be
achieved by disregarding marginalized narratives and perspectives and therefore Prakash favors negotiating the fertile tensions between different theoretical approaches and urges postcolonial critics and historians to become
stunt riders (ibid).
The challenge remains how to think and talk about the Enlightenment as a
historical period and intellectual formation without homogenizing it? Which
thinkers should be considered as representative of the Enlightenment? (cf.
Israel 2001) Against this background, the writings of scholars like Muthu,
Pitts, as well as Festa and Carey are a timely intervention in the discussion
about the ambivalent legacy of the Enlightenment.
Having said that one of my main objections to the way the problem is
posed by defendants of eighteenth century political thought is with their understanding of universality and diversity. Interestingly with sole focus on
postcolonial studies, the defendants of the Enlightenment ignore the important
mutual influences among feminism, queer studies, and postcolonial studies in
their critique of the normative violence (Butler 1999: xx) of the Enlightenment. The nuanced and complex analysis of feminist-queer-postcolonial
scholarship is reduced to a simple dualism of imperialist versus antiimperialist Enlightenment.
With regard to the concept of universalism, postcolonial scholars rightly
ask whether it is even possible to think the globe without being imperial, or
whether the very imagination of the global is inextricably linked to the the
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imperial (Hulme 2005: 45). Moreover, if one is cognizant of how the term
culture came to replace civilization and race in colonial discourses, it is
difficult to accept the recognition of cultural diversity and cultural agency as
intrinsically anti-imperialist. Muthu and others scholars too easily presume
that the recognition of cultural plurality by Kant and Herder is as such an antihegemonic move, thereby ignoring that difference and diversity are constructed and constituted through power relations. Instead of merely celebrating
diversity in the face of the threat of universalizing assimilation, the more
important question is the ideological function of diversity in so-called antiimperialist discourses. Even a superficial look at the discourses of diversity in
contemporary operations of transnational capital, whose forerunners were
intercontinental trade and commerce, advocated by Kant as a guarantee for
world peace, unfolds how the universal reach of capitalism, made possible
through colonialism, goes hand in glove with the celebration of diversity and
difference. It is instructive to remember Marxs [1844] critique of Bruno
Bauer in The Jewish Question, wherein Marx points out that the focus on
questions of religious difference and of the status of religious minorities shifts
attention away from economic issues. The recognition of cultural diversity by
Enlightenment philosophers like Kant and Herder is hardly enough to earn
them the title of anti-imperialists, which compromises the purchase of the
term. Muthu, for instance, does not really explain what the anti in the antiimperialist signifies. Is the critique of the atrocities committed by European
colonizers enough to qualify Kant and others as anti-imperialist? Is their antiimperialism the same as that of Gandhi or Fanon? As has been well documented by postcolonial thinkers, attacks on immoral imperialism were often
made in the name of more humane imperialism. For every proposed progressive idea presented by Diderot, Kant, Herder, or any other Enlightenment
thinker, one can present a counter-example of racist, sexist, and imperialist
views of these very authors.
In response to the claim that there was a strong rupture between eighteenth and nineteenth-century political thought, I would argue that instead of
viewing eighteenth-century thinkers as more progressive than nineteenthcentury thinkers, it would be instructive to explore the continuities and discontinuities in the ideas of race, national character, culture, climate, development, and progress between the two eras. Muthu contends that Mill, Hegel,
and Marx as representatives of nineteenth-century thought presumed linear
conceptions of social progress and were much more convinced of the
achievements of European civilization. Thus they supported the idea of
Europe coercively introducing superior forms of social, economic, and
political practices and institutions to the non-European world. Marx, for instance, did not view non-Europeans as inherently backward, rather he
claimed that through colonialism, they could be lifted to a condition of selfrule. He justified imperial rule as the transition of feudal societies into capi-
45
talist economies that would transform the mode of production as well as the
ownership of the means of production. However, Muthus and Pitts analysis
of the decline of anti-imperialist thinking in the nineteenth century fails to
consider the inconsistencies and contradictions in the writings of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers. By primarily highlighting their critical
reflections, there is the danger of presenting a distorted picture that silences
the deeply racist, sexist, and imperialist aspects of eighteenth-century European political thought. Thus it is imperative to simultaneously address the
ambivalences and inconsistencies in the writings of eighteenth-century thinkers, which show them to be at once imperialist and anti-imperialist.
Contrary to Muthus positive reading, I would like to draw attention to the
contradictions in Kants anti-imperialism. In his discussion of cosmopolitan
ethics in Toward Perpetual Peace, Kant [1795] addresses the issue of the
rights and duties of those who wish to cross borders. He proposes that hospitality is limited to the visitor not bring treated with hostility upon arrival on
someone elses territory, but upholds the right of the sovereign state to refuse
entry, provided this does not result in the destruction of the sojourner. He
emphasizes the temporary nature of the right to hospitality, which hinges on
the entrant not causing any trouble. Thus permanent residency depends entirely on an act of beneficence on the part of a sovereign state, which in any case
always has the prerogative to deny rights to those who create trouble. In his
deconstructive reading of Kants conditional hospitality, Derrida (2000)
speaks of hostpitality, namely, the hostility intrinsic in Kantian reflections
on hospitality. According to him, a truly cosmopolitan ethics would entail
absolute hospitality, which is unconditional and is not qualified upon the
guest fulfilling certain criteria to receive hospitality.
Similarly the greatest strength of the Kantian categorical imperative lies in
its insistence on the fundamental equality of all moral agents. However, this is
accompanied by the demand that individuals prove themselves worthy of
being treated as equal by fulfilling the normative understanding of morality.
Otherwise they forfeit their right to be treated equally. Spivak reads the Kantian categorical imperative as a displacement of Christian ethics from religion
to philosophy (1985: 267). She rephrases the categorical imperative as follows: make the heathen into a human so that he can be treated as an end in
himself (ibid). This violent act of making the heathen into human through
the civilizing mission of colonialism symbolizes the ideology of imperialist
axiomatics, which employs transcendent concepts like morality or culture to
justify colonialism as civilizing mission. At the same time colonialisms economic imperative and coercive means are concealed (Morton 2007: 20).
Spivak clarifies, however, that her mistaken (1999: 3) reading of Kant is a
scrupulous travesty in order to find a constructive rather than disabling
complicity between our position and theirs (ibid: 1314).
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12
Critiquing Foucault and Deleuze for abandoning the task of representing oppressed groups
by claiming that they can speak for themselves, Spivak contends that there is no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself (1994a: 8081).
Montaigne was the first to invoke the figure of the indigenous American savage critic. For
more see Pagden (1983).
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resentability of the native (ibid: 228). Thus from within the heart of Europe,
counter-discourses emerge to articulate the ills of French society and colonialism. Unpacking the ideological implications of this fictional staging written
at critical moments of French colonial expansion, Garraway argues that these
writings in many ways anticipate postcolonial critique.
Striking a cautionary note Mira Kamdar argues that in the staging of the
native speaking subject, the Enlightenment philosopher speaks only for himself, while claiming to give voice to the natives, thereby privileging European
agency (1990: 99). The benevolent representation of the native voice on the
stage of world history ironically silences it (ibid). Garraway also raises the
important question of the ideological significance of deploying the trope of
the savage critic by French Enlightenment philosophers (1999: 233). Contra Muthu, Garraway refuses to accept at face value the European Enlightenment philosophers rhetorical opposition to colonialism (ibid: 210). She
argues that these fabricated stagings were instead strategies and tactics deployed to stimulate contestation and debates that were absent in the metropolitan public sphere in order to instigate the reform of French colonial policies.
Unpacking the ideological nature of the fantasy of the savage critic, Garraway argues that instead of being anti-imperialist, the Enlightenment philosophers were merely pro-reform (ibid: 233). The primary aim was not a radical
transformation of colonial relations, but a mere remedying of abuses, thereby
contributing to the continuation of the unjust order. The imaginary staging of
dissent and contestation consolidated colonial hegemony in the Gramscian
sense, in that the negotiation with resistant groups and the introduction of
reform stabilized the ruling ideological formation (ibid: 234). Garraway convincingly argues that eighteenth-century critique of colonialism contributed to
a new colonial discourse based on Enlightenment conceptions of universal
reason, individual freedom, and commercial progress (ibid: 210). Through
native surrogates, Enlightenment philosophers galvanized support among the
European public for a reformed enlightened colonialism, which was capable of accommodating the criticisms of the imagined subjects of empire (ibid:
234). This was a call to reform rather than an end to colonialism (ibid: 236).
Although drawing the readers sympathy for the natives suffering, the Europeanization of the savage critic, who is staged as an articulate representative of Enlightenment thought, ironically subverts the radicality of anticolonial opposition. The voicing of resistance was in the language of universal reason (ibid: 234). The critique of French colonial power presented
through fictional colonial subjects presumed that these imagined colonized
people would consent to the proposed reforms implied in the critique (ibid).
Thus the Enlightenment philosophers appropriation of the native voice and
subject position did indeed contribute to the silencing of the Other and the
nullifying of the subversive potential of their counter-discourses (ibid: 210).
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through the speaking native, thereby avoiding sanctions though the strategic
deployment of prosopopoeia. Through a discourse of contestation and opposition to colonial abuses, core norms were reinforced in the name of a more
humane relation with the non-European world based on Enlightenment ideals
(ibid). Colonialism was reconfigured in the guise of commerce and individual
freedom and shaped in the Enlightenments image, thereby consolidating
European dominance. The trope of the enlightened savages, the promise of
power of reason to liberate people, and the expression of an imaginary global
solidarity served to obscure the coercive aspects of the Enlightenment ideals
of reason, progress, property, citizenship, and free trade (ibid). A new discourse of imperialism emerged, which ironically derived its legitimacy from
the supposed native critique of colonialism (ibid). Thus, in response to Muthus claim that Diderot voiced a passionate denouncement of imperial brutalities and recommended non-exploitative commercial relations that respected
the plurality of human cultural values, I would counter-argue that to neglect
the imperialist nature of Diderots position is to downplay the violence of his
discourse.
As previously mentioned, another significant issue raised by the postcolonial critique of Enlightenment is the question of the material underpinnings of
the Enlightenment, namely, the inextricable link between Enlightenment,
colonialism, and capitalism.13 The Enlightenment anti-slavery movement is
famously cited as a prime example of anti-imperialist impulses. However, this
overlooks how the abolishment of slavery in British and French colonies
vindicated the European self-representation as humane, while the persistence of slave-trading in Africa provided further justification for colonizing
Africa. Thus even as the abolitionist movement is repeatedly cited as an example of anti-imperialist impulses, I would read it more as an example of how
Europeans emerged as ethical subjects once again by instrumentalizing discourses of freedom and humanity. The call for boycott of slave-produced
goods was to exonerate oneself by acting as an enlightened consumer. These
paternalistic humanitarian efforts were at the heart of the construction of
responsible imperialism, which ignores that slavery was replaced by the
indentured labor system, which too was exploitative and dehumanizing.
Addressing the question Who financed the Enlightenment? Mary
Poovey (2010) and Ian Baucom (2010) contend that the erasure of this question is intrinsic to the Enlightenment. Poovey (2010: 323) explores the paradoxical relation between money and memory, wherein money loses its own
history. She argues that the effective power of money to hold and transfer
value depends upon transforming an earlier medium for transmitting value
13
Interestingly, when Jrgen Habermas (1987), following Kant, links the flourishing of coffee
houses and salons with the emergence of bourgeois public spheres as sites of deliberative
democracy in Europe, he fails to mention the exploitative conditions under which coffee
and tobacco were produced for European consumption.
51
like gold into new genres of money such as bills of exchange, letters of credit,
or Bank of England notes. However, the efficacy of these proliferating money
genres depends upon an abstraction that effaces the memory of any relation to
original forms of value (ibid). Money performs different functions as a universal equivalent, which facilitates exchange and commerce, storing of value
and amassing of wealth (ibid: 335). Both Poovey and Baucom note that this
abstraction, namely money becoming capital, was an important aspect of the
erasure of the history of money. In order for modern money to perform most
of the functions it is expected to serve, there must be an effacing of the
memory of the various forms money has previously taken (ibid).
Baucom (2010: 337) explains that money is a carrier of the law that, in
expanding the scope of the law, multiplies the boundaries of law and correspondingly those of sanctioned violence. Focusing on international law that
reaches beyond the sovereign state, he examines how this justifies violence
against those who are deemed inimical by virtue of not possessing a state, a
senate, and a treasury (ibid). According to Baucom, this nexus of
law/money/violence, in which each mediates the others, wins formal philosophical sanction as a global imperative or universal rule through Kants
concept of cosmopolitanism. Money, on its network of travels around the
globe, carries with it international law. To the extent that money, as a convertible unit of account, renders possible exchange across national markets, it
also renders possible international law (ibid: 341). The founding monopoly
on legitimate, law-sanctioned violence through which the commonwealth is
established thus creates the conditions for the accumulation of money, which
necessitates the intensification of the states capacity for violence (ibid:
342).14 As money accumulates, the violence of a sovereign power must expand accordingly, which enables further amassing of money (ibid: 343).
Caught in the cycle of the accumulation of money and violence, the commonwealth inevitably runs up against its national boundaries. The solution is
imperialism, which resolves the problems of over-accumulation of money and
violence for the national state (ibid).
In Ciceros Ghost: The Atlantic, the Enemy and the Laws of War, Baucom (2009) presents a scathing critique of Kantian cosmopolitanism and
makes a powerful case against the claim that cosmopolitan right is necessarily
emancipatory. In the Metaphysics of Morals [1785] Kant states that the
rights of a state against an unjust enemy are unlimited in quantity or degree
(Kant 1977d: 473). This departs from Kants general understanding of the
limits of the states right to make war against its enemies (ibid: 469). In his
discussion on international rights, Kant explains that unjust enemy is some14
Baucom argues that this conceptual machinery has been revived by the post 9/11 U.S.
national security agencies on behalf of an unabashedly conjoined theory and practice of international law, global war, and speculative capital (2010: 337).
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one who makes peace among nations impossible (ibid: 473). In the subsequent portion of his text on cosmopolitan right, Kant links together universal
theory of right, international trade and commerce, and the international law of
war (ibid: 476477). Cosmopolitan right, in Kants view, is the global right to
commerce, which must be enshrined in law and defended through a global
right to violence, if and when necessary (Baucom 2009: 126). This implies
that a global right to commerce is foundational to the emergence of a universal legal order. The cosmopolitan right to commerce and the universal international law extend, via the right to settlement, into those regions of the earth
inhabited by peoples like the Hottentots of the Cape (ibid: 134135). While
Kant maintains that these lawless people should only be made to enter into
a universal cosmopolitanism by treaty, their condition of lawlessness makes
them incapable of participating in binding contracts (ibid). This leads to the
paradoxical situation that while international law and cosmopolitan right
should only be extended by treaty, however given the impossibility of garnering the consent of the lawless, the use of violence becomes unavoidable in
the interest of extending the operating spheres of global commerce (ibid).
Kant is thereby confronted with a dilemma: While rejecting violence as a
means of globally establishing the condition of cosmopolitan right, he cannot
explain how global commerce, international law, and cosmopolitan right can
come into existence without it (ibid: 135136). For precisely to the extent that
lawless people like the Hottentots are seen to be living in a state of nature,
in a condition of the stateless, acommercial, acontractual war of all against
all, they represent a threat to the freedom of all nations (ibid). Accordingly,
in this situation, Kant endorses the recourse to violence against such unjust
enemies (Kant 1977d: 473). Kants cosmopolitan fantasy of free trade guaranteeing perpetual peace is at the cost of reinforcing the nexus between law,
violence, and money (Baucom 2009: 136). This is by no means an antiimperialist endeavor by any stretch of the imagination.
Making a compelling case, Baucoms and Pooveys readings go against
the sympathetic interpretation of a more progressive Kant in his later writings.
This is contrary to the claim that there was a shift in Kants later writings on
cosmopolitanism, marking a move away from his racist beliefs. Pauline
Kleingeld contends that Kant improved his position during the 1790s and
had second thoughts on race in the middle of his critical period (2007:
575). She admits that in his early writings Kant endorsed pro-slavery views
and defended racial hierarchy, however, rather than dismissing Kant as a
consistent inegalitarian, she sees him as an inconsistent universalist (ibid:
576). While some Kant scholars distinguish between Kants serious theory
and his prejudices, which they deem marginal to his political thought
(Louden 2002, Zammito 2002, Wilson 2006), others argue that one cannot
decouple the two: In their powerful writings, Robert Bernasconi (2001), Tsenay Serequeberhan (1997), Charles Mills (1997) and Emmanuel Chukwudi
53
Eze (1997a, 1997b) unpack the negated inclusion of the figure of the African in Kants anthropological history. In The Color of Reason Eze (1997a:
115) analyzes Kantian racism, which is succinctly asserted in Kants claim
that humanity exists in its greatest perfection in the white race (cf. Kant
1977a: 2728). Kant asserts that the morals and customs of non-European
peoples are devoid of ethical principles because of their lack of rational will
and self-reflectivity, which builds moral character through the educational
process of the development of goodness latent in human nature (Eze 1997a:
115). In Kants table of moral classifications, while the Americans are completely uneducable, the Africans can only be trained as slaves and servants
through physical coercion and corporeal punishment (Kant 1977a: 16). Shifting focus to India, he asserts that although the Hindus all look like philosophers, they are incapable of abstract concepts and concludes that they cannot
advance (ibid). The only race that is capable of progress are the white
Europeans. He makes a direct link between skin color and climate and characteristics like talent, morality, intelligence, capabilities, and character.
Eze (1997a: 118) traces an inconsistency in Kants position, wherein on
the one hand, Kant insists that his narrative about the beginnings and the
development of human history is conjectural. However, on the other hand,
in his raciology Kant hierarchically posits first the American Indian, then the
Negro and the Asian as primitive and inferior stages of humanity, for
humanity proper is embodied only in the white European male (ibid: 125).
Kant, in Ezes view, is a normative essentialist. Although, unlike Rousseau,
Kant does not advocate any substantified condition from which humans have
degenerated, or to which they are supposed to return, he does propose that the
essence of human nature is a teleology that humans must realize (ibid: 125).
The true nature of man does not consist in what one is, but in what one
ought to become (ibid: 126). Eze asks if Kants doctrine of human nature is
only normatively, rather than descriptively essentialist, what about his racial
theories? What for Kant is the essence of race (ibid)? Kant suggests that
there is an essential and natural gift that those who are white inherently
have and those who are black inherently lack. The evidence for this natural endowment or the lack thereof is skin color, which constitutes the racial
essence. This indicates that the essentialism of Kants raciology is biologically rooted (ibid).
Eze speculates how Kant managed to accumulate so much knowledge of
Africa, Asia, and the Americas, never having put a foot on any of these continents. One obvious source is books. Published accounts of other lands in
travel literatures of explorers and missionaries were widely available. Furthermore Knigsberg, where Kant lived all his life, was a bustling seaport
well-situated for overseas trade and provided opportunity for interaction with
peoples of diverse languages and customs (ibid: 128). Eze argues that hearsays as well as sensationalist and propogandist accounts were transformed
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into academic science (ibid: 129). Recycling stereotypes and prejudices about
non-European peoples and cultures, Kant offered a strong philosophical justification of the superior/inferior classification of the races of men (ibid). The
highly theoretical and transcendental nature of his theories refutes claims of
scholars who propose that Kants writings on race and his interest in anthropology and cultural geography was a mere pastime and not philosophically
serious. Eze argues convincingly that Kants reflections on geography and
anthropology were neither marginal to his teaching and professional philosophical career nor inconsequential to a profound understanding of him as a
cultural thinker (ibid: 130). The attempt to trivialize Kants theories of race
may stem from the embarrassing difficulty of reconciling his racist and imperialist ideas with his supposedly more progressive notions of cosmopolitan
right that are so central to modern political thought. It is no easy task for the
Western philosophical tradition to accept the fact that something went terribly
wrong with the best of Enlightenment. As Eze points out, that which one
ought to become in order to deserve human dignity, sounds very much like
Kant himself: white, European, and male (ibid: 130). Dissidents would be
treated as a rebel against fundamental principles of human nature (ibid:
131, italics in original).
Along similar lines Mills (1997: 53) argues in The Racial Contract that
even as Kant defines persons simply as rational beings, without any apparent restrictions of gender or race, the female body is demarcated as insufficiently rational to be politically anything more than a passive citizen. Similarly, the Racial Contract is explicitly predicated on the politics of the body,
which is related to the body politic through restrictions on which bodies qualify as political (ibid: 120). There are bodies that are judged incapable of
forming or fully entering into the body politic. Skin color for Kant is not
merely a physical characteristic; rather it is evidence of an intrinsic moral
quality and the capacity to reason. Mills goes on to argue that
the embarrassing fact for the white West (which doubtless explains its concealment) is
that their most important moral theorist of the past three hundred years is also the foundational theorist in the modem period of the division between Herrenvolk and Untermenschen, persons and subpersons, upon which Nazi theory would later draw (ibid: 72,
italics in original).
In Mills view, modern moral theory and modern racial theory have the same
source: the racial contract underwrites the social contract (ibid: 70). The ideal
norm of the Kantian social contract of the infinite value of all human life thus
has to be rewritten to reflect the actual Racial Contract norm of the far
greater value of white life (ibid: 101). Egalitarianism becomes equality
among equals with blacks and others being ontologically excluded from the
fruits of the Enlightenment (ibid: 58).
In response to the claims that these early racist ideas were discarded or
improved upon in Kants later writings, I would counter-argue that it is im-
55
perative to address the tensions between the rupture and reinscription of the
trope of race in early and later Kant. Instead of a simple break with earlier
forms of racism, one needs to trace how the discourse is recovered, modified,
and reconfigured in new forms. Earlier ideas of race do not disappear, but are
superimposed and remodelled in discourses of cosmopolitanism. In Kleingelds view Kantian cosmopolitanism is incompatible with colonialism, in
that Kant grants full juridical status to non-whites as being capable of signing
contracts, while explicitly prohibiting the colonial conquest of foreign lands
(2007: 586). It is also argued that Kant moves away from a critique of transclimatic migration, which he previously explained in terms of natures purposive hindering of non-whites to physically and mentally adapt to Nordic
climates. However, instead of reading Kants support of intercontinental migration as advancement over his previous racist views, I propose that Kant is
merely adapting his theory to a new phase of imperialism. Thus, instead of a
corrective, I would read it in terms of a more sophisticated and less crude
form of racism. Like Herder who opposed the mixing of human species,
which according to him would produce a non-viable monstrosity (Kleingeld
2007: 577 fn 12), Kant too was against the fusion of races that would lead
to humans becoming physically and psychologically similar. His acceptance
of diversity led him to reject racial assimilation for fear of universal uniformity. One detects a deeply racist ideology in this safeguarding of the diversity of
the human species. Kleingeld (2007: 591592) proposes that Kants change
of mind could have been prompted by his general revision of his theory of
biology. It is important to note that Kant never gave up the concept of race as
a biological category. Just because most Enlightenment thinkers rejected
polygenecism and asserted the fundamental species equality of humankind
does not imply that they abandoned their belief in the hierarchical nature of
the human races. In fact, the argument of the species unity of humanity is an
ideological ruse to distance Enlightenment political thought from any racial
connotations (Elden 2009). Thus Kants monogenetic view is not enough to
prove his anti-imperialist credentials.
While scholars like Muthu contend that postcolonial critics do not know
what to make of the anti-imperialist impulses of eighteenth-century political
thought, I am tempted to counter-argue that political philosophers by and
large are still at a loss of how to deal with the deeply racist and imperialist
consequences of emancipatory European thought. They are unable to come to
terms with the profound contradiction that European Enlightenment was
deeply exclusionary, coercive, and violent.
Reading Muthus and Pittss claim that Kant, Herder, and Diderot were
better anti-imperialists than Hegel or Marx, one wonders why postcolonial
studies, irrespective of the regional and historical focus, prefer the latter over
the former when addressing issues of power, domination, and resistance.
From Ngritude to South Asian Subaltern Studies, from Fanon to Dubois, it is
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Marx and not Diderot who inspires the postcolonial imagination. Are the
postcolonial scholars simply guilty of being ignorant or are Muthu and Pitts
too generous with the label anti-imperialist? While it is commendable to
interrupt a linear narrative of the history of ideas, wherein the latter philosopher marks an improvement and corrective to the thought of his predecessor,
claiming the inverse that all was well in the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century ushered in a decline in progressive thought is problematic.
Finally, in claiming that eighteenth-century Enlightenment anticipated
some of the most significant critiques in postcolonial thought, the agency of
the non-European world to transform Europe is discounted. This raises the
question of the relation of postcolonial studies to critical thinking. What are
the consequences of the claim that Enlightenment was always already antiimperialist and self-critical? If there is a strong link between the practice of
critique and the emergence of agency, what are the consequences of the monopolization of critical thinking by the Enlightenment for the postcolonial
world?
Enlightenment Is Critique
This section deals with how the postcolonial world is to deal with the difficult
legacy of Enlightenment critical thinking, which renders impossible any for or
against positions vis--vis the Enlightenment. One of the most important
contributions of critical engagements with the Enlightenment is the challenge
to its self-judgment as progressive and emancipatory. The problems posed by
the Enlightenment cannot be resolved either by rejecting it or by representing
the process of Enlightenment as yet-to-be-completed. Rather it entails affirming the antinomies of Enlightenment that cannot be easily resolved (Cascardi
1999: 29). Enlightenments effort to suppress the other of reason, ranging
from superstition and madness to religion and tradition, was however never
fully achieved by the process of Enlightenment (ibid: 31). Thus even as the
Enlightenment sought to eliminate the other of reason and control its unpredictability, this remains an unsustainable promise (ibid: 33).
Critics like Peter Sloterdijk (1987) regard cynicism as a possible antidote
to the Enlightenment in order to avert future disenchantment. It has been
argued that such positions tend to disregard the ambivalent legacies of the
Enlightenment. The unmasking of the coercive aspects of the Enlightenment
risks does not automatically entail forfeiture of progressive social and ethical
projects as lost causes. Drawing on Albert Hirschman, Schmidt (2000: 742)
outlines that similar to the French Revolution, the assessment of the Enlightenment is caught between three positions: The perversity thesis, which
suggests that any attempt at transforming society runs the risk of producing
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contrary effects to those intended, the futility thesis, which states that attempts to transform societies will bring about a change that is superficial and
cosmetic, hence illusionary, and the jeopardy thesis, which claims that the
proposed change, though perhaps desirable in itself, involves unacceptable
costs or consequences. Schmidt adds to this the critique of excessive Enlightenment, which is positioned against attempts to push the Enlightenment
too far (ibid: 743). He identifies Adorno and Horkheimer as well as Foucault with the perversity argument, whereby, in their view, quest for freedom
produces slavery, for democracy produces tyranny, and for progress produces
disenfranchisement. Remarking on the negative tone of Dialectic of Enlightenment Schmidt states that it is only through a mercilessly negativistic
critique of what enlightenment had become that the past hopes of the Enlightenment might be redeemed (1996: 25). Thus paradoxically, perhaps
only by taking up the arguments of the Enlightenments most vehement critics
can the hopes of the Enlightenment be kept alive (ibid: 26).
One popular approach to the problems posed by the Enlightenment is to
envision a return to the wisdom of the pre-Enlightenment era. This attitude
represents an effort to step back and reverse the process of the Enlightenment
by recovering pre-Enlightenment ways of being and thinking and seeks to
deny the fact that the Enlightenment has had consequences (Cascardi 1999:
40): The yearning to undo the Enlightenment ignores how the emergence of a
critical consciousness is itself a legacy of the Enlightenment.
In contrast to his earlier understanding of the Enlightenment as the age
that paved the way for discipline and normalization, of surveillance and control of bodies and souls, of marginalization and exclusion of the deviant, the
abnormal, the insane, in one of the last writings, Foucault offers a qualified
endorsement of the Enlightenment ethos of critique. In his essay What is
Critique? (1996), Foucault argues that the question of the Enlightenment
remains central to critical theory. According to him, we cannot free ourselves
of this legacy nor can we easily position ourselves for or against the Enlightenment (cf. Foucault 1984: 45). Thus the question of our relationship to the
Enlightenment is marked by the impossibility of categorically locating ourselves either inside or outside the Enlightenment (Cascardi 1999: 5). The
challenge is to contest the violent consequences of Enlightenment rationality
without taking up an anti-Enlightenment stance. According to Cascardi, the
Kantian Enlightenment project is structurally incomplete (ibid: 6), as there
is no point beyond the system from which to reflect upon it, thereby indicating the impossibility of achieving closure. The aim of Enlightenment thought
is the persistent transgression of our ways of thinking, doing, and being. Foucault links the Kantian practice of critique of arbitrary political power, an
important legacy of the Enlightenment, with the art of governance (Foucault 1996: 384). The critical project that Kant identifies with the Enlightenment has now been turned against the Enlightenment and its ideals
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If governmentalization is concerned with subjugating individuals, then critique is the art of voluntary inservitude, of reflective indocility. The essential
function of critique would be that of desubjectification (Foucault 1996: 386).
This critical attitude does not consist of a categorical rejection of government,
but only of the technologies, tactics, and rationalities that make us governmentalizable (see Butler 2002).
In Foucaults view, modern philosophy has not been capable of answering
the question What is Enlightenment? but has at the same time not managed
to get rid of it either (1984: 32). Kant defines the Enlightenment in an almost
entirely negative way, as an exit, a way out. He seeks to understand the
present in terms of the difference it introduces with respect to yesterday (ibid:
34). Thus the Enlightenment is not conceived within the framework of a progressive teleology of history, rather it is concerned with testing the historical
and contemporary limits of the necessary (ibid: 43). Like Kant, whose main
concern in engaging with the Enlightenment was the political question of the
mode of dissent possible for citizens and their obligations in the face of state
restrictions, Foucault, too, is concerned with the art of government and the
critical attitude necessary to disrupt particular rationalities and technologies
of being governed. The Enlightenment is opposed, not to authority per se, but
rather to those forms of authority that are maintained coercively rather than
by consent (Schmidt 1996: 19). This is the emancipatory promise of reflection, which lies at the heart of Kants notion of the Enlightenment. As has
been argued by critics of the Enlightenment, this position disregards that
reflection itself is determined by socio-historical contexts. This raises the
questions: What does the practice of critique entail? What does it mean to
exercise ruthless critique here and now? Who is fit to practice it? From a
postcolonial-queer-feminist perspective it is imperative to trace an alternative
genealogy of the politics of critique and re-imagine its relation to the process
of decolonization.
The origin of the term critique can be traced to the Greek word krinein
or krino, which means to separate, to decide, to fight, to accuse.
Used initially in the juridical sphere, it referred to both the act of accusing
and the giving of a verdict, it indicated the ability to differentiate, to ask probing questions, and to judge. Another related noun is Krisis, which could be
59
read as turning point, and Kriterion, namely the means for judging. Wendy
Brown (2009: 9) traces how the multi-faceted holism of the Greek term Krisis
lost its nuances and became limited primarily to its medical connotation of a
turning point of the disease, namely, the critical condition of the patient.
She highlights the important difference between criticism and critique,
even as she points out that different theorists understand critique differently,
ranging from ideology critique to cultural critique to social critique (ibid).
Critique as a form of free and open speech (parrhesia) was especially associated with the cynics. The Greek term kynikos, from which it is derived,
means dog-like. No wonder the cynics were called the watchdogs of humanity, as it was their explicit aim to challenge the doxa, the prevailing, established view. Diogenes remarks other dogs bite their enemies, I bite my
friends to save them (cit. in Stobaeus Florilegium). Over the next few centuries, critique increasingly came to exemplify the activity that separated
reason from revelation by the systematic exposure of errors. Its most famous
proponent was of course Kant, who in response to Humes skepticism that
undermined certainty in any knowledge, sought to prevent pure reason from
making speculative errors by keeping it within proper limits. Instead of striving to transcend all limits, the Kantian definition of critique as the analysis
and reflection upon limits shifted the focus to the question of enabling limits (Simons 1995: 34). His analytic of finitude instructs us that we are indebted to limits for they are not only constraints, but also conditions of possibility. As is well known, Kant eventually called his transcendental philosophy
critical philosophy, distinguishing between limits and possibilities interior
to the process of knowledge and restrictions imposed by an external authority.
The other aspect of Kantian critical philosophy focuses on engaging with
others through the mode of the public exercise of rational critique. The court
of reason becomes the arena for the practice of critique as a process of epistemological self-correction within the established limits of reason. The Kantian dictum that everything must be submitted to critique, even reason itself,
implies that critique begins with challenging the demand for absolute obedience and subjecting every obligation imposed on persons to a rational and
reflective evaluation. Kant, drawing on Horace, invokes the courage of reason
Sapere aude, dare to know as the Enlightenments motto (1977c: 55). If the
only obstacle to Enlightenment is fear and laziness, then human beings can
transform their circumstances by recognizing the lack of resolution and courage to use reason as the source of their own oppression. The Enlightenment,
in Kants view, is mans emergence from his self-incurred immaturity Ignorance is not a lack of knowledge, but a weakness of the will, indicating
mans inability to make use of his understanding without direction from
another (ibid).
With Hegel [1802] the reconfiguration of critique as immanent emerged.
It was immanent in that its critical standards emerged in the historical pro-
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cess. Hegels critique did not start externally, but stemmed from the internal
antagonism of things to be criticized, whose fissures provided the possible
space for the emergence of critique. It was the self-critique of things to be
criticized. Marx was attracted to Hegels philosophy even as he transformed
immanent critique radically. For him immanent principles are necessary
weapons in the struggle for progressive social change, because they provide a
basis for critique within the historical reality. This immanent grounding became the axis of his emancipatory critique of capitalism. Marx also attaches
great importance to the self-critique of things. However, in the Preface of
Critique of Political Economy [1859], he addresses the limitations of social
self-critique, whereby he proposes that no society can earnestly undertake
self-criticism before its productive force has been realized. Marxs insights
illuminate the complex relationship between society and the critical consciousness of its members. He tells us that the emancipation of the workers
will have to be the work of the workers themselves. Marxist critical theory
links the public activity of critique to its revolutionary function. Moving beyond the limits imposed on critique within epistemology, Marx transforms
critique into a weapon for those who seek to change reality, not merely interpret it. In a letter to Arnold Ruge he writes:
But if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all
the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism
of all that exists (rcksichtslose Kritik alles Bestehenden), ruthless both in the sense of not
being afraid of the results it arrives at and of conflicting with the powers that be (1976:
345).
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Another important aspect is the relation of critique to itself. A selfreflexive critique attempts to ground its own possibility by means of the same
categories it seeks to overcome (Butler 2002, 2009). Thus, the immanent
critique of the present and the transformation of existing order are intrinsically related. This necessitates the social critique of the present, which indicates
a possible future fundamentally different and yet emerging from it. Such selfreflexivity marks the Frankfurt School of critical theorists, who were inspired
by Marxist theory, yet opposed the totalitarian interpretations of Marxism and
the state socialist bureaucratic domination they created. They pursued a critique of reason being reduced to a means-end instrumentality, which enabled
a broader understanding of the relation between knowledge and domination.
They unpacked how the anti-authoritarian principle of Enlightenment reason
made way for domination in both the natural and human realms, showing how
faith in the emancipatory force of reason resulted in the failure to
acknowledge how it fashioned new logics of domination. Adorno and
Horkheimer see the Enlightenment as having faltered, but conclude that rather
than giving it up, the Enlightenment project itself should be radicalized. It is
the task of critical theorists to reveal the domination of positivistic, scientific,
instrumental categories and structures that shape our current world and to
activate oppositional forces towards human emancipation. It is speculated that
Adorno and Horkheimer talked about writing a sequel titled Rescuing the
Enlightenment (Rettung der Aufklrung). This recovery project was, however, not undertaken. Bronner (2004: 3) proposes that the logic of their argument ultimately left them with few possibilities of conceptualizing an effective political form of opposition. The democratic inheritance of the Enlightenment and its interventionist mode to transform social and political reality
was sidelined. In contrast, Ernst Bloch [19541959] brings together critique
with the emergence of hope and utopias, linking the practice of critique with
imagining the not-yet, even as hope must be disappointed in order to guard it
from becoming totalitarian.
Despite important differences, what is common within the Western paradigm is the assumption that critical speech to be free must be exercised in
public and must involve risk-taking. In regarding itself as confronting relations of power, critique aspires to be heroic (Asad 2009a: 49). This raises
questions like: How is the freedom of critique shaped? In what way is it connected to at once subverting and reinforcing power? What forms of critical
inquiry are justified? Is it an individual endeavor or a collective action? How
do criteria for legitimate critique emerge, by what means are they enforced,
and how can they be transformed? Does one need epistemic certainty in order
to practice critique? If as Derrida claims critique is first and foremost an act
of love rather than a negative practice, how does the object of critique define
the meaning of critique? Where does the critic draw legitimacy for her practice?
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In one of the most challenging philosophical disputes of our times, Foucault and Derrida debate the limits and tools of critique. In his lecture Cogito
and the History of Madness, Derrida (1978: 3334) rejects Foucaults critical
project to go beyond the Western form of reason and the violence it entails.
Derrida contends that Foucaults critical project entails a tricky paradox,
namely, how can one attempt to speak for the silenced by the use of the very
instrument, namely, the language of reason that had previously silenced them.
As Derrida remarks:
The misfortune of the mad, the interminable misfortune of their silence, is that their best
spokesmen are those who betray them best; which is to say that when one attempts to
convey their silence itself, one has already passed over to the side of the enemy, the side of
order, even if one fights against order (ibid: 3536).
In Derridas view, reason puts reason on trial in the name of the mad, whereby this is not possible without recourse to a discourse that itelf produces the
silencing of the mad. Derridas thesis is provocative insofar as he suggests
that it is impossible to avoid complicity in the exclusions of reason. As soon
as one uses language, one collaborates in the process of silencing. There is no
alternative, whereby reason-in-general cannot be surpassed. Derrida professes
that Foucault knows the impossibility of his project, whereby the language of
exclusion, namely, the language of reason, cannot be used to combat exclusion. He finds Foucaults project to be deceptive for it contends to absolve
itself of its investment in the discourse of reason. Five years later, Foucault
responded to Derrida in a paper entitled My Body, This Paper, This Fire
(1979), wherein he performs a double critique on both Derrida and himself.
Foucault suggests that even if Derridas arguments seem plausible, they nonetheless rob his thinking of all its potentially political force. If, as Derrida
contends, exclusion and violence are not historical but economical, namely,
essential to the economy of language as such, then exclusion is the general
condition and the constitutive foundation of the very possibility of speech.
How then, is any form of critique that does not reproduce the mechanisms of
violence it seeks to challenge possible? Eighteen years later, in his lecture
How to Avoid Speaking: Denials (1996), Derrida refers to Ludwig Wittgensteins statement [a]bout that which one cannot speak, one must remain
silent and emphasizes that the imperative one must is of great significance.
In response to the ethical question of speech versus silence, Derrida implores
that one must not avoid speaking (1996: 11). Although Foucault is not
named, Derrida upholds
the necessity of speaking even at the price of a war declared by the language of reason
against itself [because] language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique (Derrida cit. in Spivak 2002 [1967]: xviii).
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call for anti-colonial violence, Arendt claims that the glorification of violence
is caused by the severe frustration of the faculty of action in the modern
world. As is evident, the tension between critique and violence is not easy to
negotiate.
Another important aspect in our discussion on critical practice is the status
of categories like class, race, or gender, which are simultaneously the target
as well as tools of critique. For instance, there is an interesting on-going debate within Critical Race Theory about the significance of the critical as
well as race: For some theorists, critical serves the negative function of
determining that which must be overcome. Accordingly race is dismissed
on the basis of its constructivity. For others, following Kant, critical serves
the function of determining the conditions of meaning and the limits of concept of race. For instance, W. E. B. Du Bois famous critique of the color
line in The Souls of Black Folk (1996: 13) did not limit itself to contesting
prevailing racial assumptions, but targeted the very study of race itself. At the
heart of Du Bois critical race theory, then, is a critique of theory itself.
Critical Race Feminists complicate the discussion by unfolding the inseparability of racial politics from gender and sexual politics. They illuminate how
critique, when it only engages with one dimension of domination, risks reproducing violence. This necessitates anti-imperialist and anti-racist critique
within feminist and queer politics, even as postcolonial politics must engage
with a critique of reproductive heteronormativity. One without the other
reinforces violent mechanisms of oppression.
Another related challenge is: How can feminist, queer, and postcolonial
theory make a simultaneous claim to being a legitimate heir to the Enlightenment while critiquing it? If European and Man have been historically
synonymous with the critical, what relation does its Other have to the task
of critique? If, as insisted in the Western philosophical tradition, Enlightenment is critique, how can the Enlightenment be taken beyond the confines of
Europe and be made to work for the Other? If critiques primary function is
to enable maturity, turning men into adults who reject external authority
and can think for themselves, Asad (2009b: 141) questions how the global
North coerces the global South to assume what they regard as a mature critical attitude. On the other hand, does it suffice to critique Western operations
of racist and imperialist violence or must not the postcolony confront its own
failures? And yet, how does one safeguard that this auto-critique is not instrumentalized to disqualify postcolonial-queer-feminist perspectives?
In conclusion, the role of the critical thinker must be addressed. On the
one hand is the professional critic, who is less concerned with challenging
power, rather strives to systematize the activity of critique, laying bare its
goals, its methods, theorizing it into disciplines, normalizing, and regulating
its scope (Asad 2009a: 55). Disciplinary criticism makes critique integral to
the growth of useful knowledge and therefore intrinsic to the exercise of
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modern power (ibid: 53). Herein the freedom to criticize is coded as a right as
well as duty of every modern individual, whose relentless pursuit of truth and
freedom is the signature of his or her political agency. But as Asad reminds
us, every critical practice is located in material conditions that determine the
contours, the aims, and the forms of the emergence of the practice of critique
(ibid: 54). What the exertion of critique challenges, undermines, ruptures,
stabilizes, reinforces are enabled and regulated by corporate and state power,
namely, the targets of critical criticism (ibid).
This leaves us with several challenging questions when confronted with
the difficult task of decolonization: What privileged function has critique
come to occupy in our postcolonial world? How does it shape subject constitution? How has critique become the indispensable way to freedom? Instead
of being emancipatory or challenging relations of power, can critique be motivated by the desire to conquest? Can it become, as Asad (2009b: 139) asks,
an exercise in cruelty or seduction? How does power inform the exercise of
critique and how does critique sustain power? If Cicero contends that philosophy is the study of how to prepare ones self to die, then the question is how
is the art of critique linked to survival?
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However, Scott is careful to state that he does not believe that the anticolonial employment of an emancipationist history was an error; rather the
goals of anti-colonial nationalists are no longer valid for postcolonial times
(ibid: 7). He examines the postcolonial condition as being marked by an
acute paralysis of will and sheer vacancy of imagination, the rampant corruption and
vicious authoritarianism [] an exercise of power bereft of any pretense of the exercise of
vision (ibid: 2).
The hopes of a new beginning that accompanied the formation of new nations
after gaining independence have largely collapsed, so that anticolonial utopias have gradually withered into postcolonial nightmares (ibid). Scotts
lamentation we live in tragic times marks the failure of the project of decolonization. What is at stake in critically thinking through the postcolonial
present is not the fixing of a teleological plot to realize pre-defined goals, but
the refusal to be seduced by the disillusioned present (ibid). As historians of
the present la Foucault, postcolonial scholars need to reflect on what
present it is that the past is being reimagined for (ibid). Our histories of the
past should be strategic interrogations of the present as a way of helping us to
envision the possibilities for an alternative future.
Focusing on the figure of Toussaint LOuverture, Scott remarks that nonEuropeans were conscripted to Enlightenments and modernitys project.
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They were not volunteers, but rather were coercively obliged to render themselves its objects and its agents (ibid: 9). Modernity was not an option to
disregard or accept for the non-Europeans, but one of the fundamental conditions of choice (ibid: 19). The tragedy of LOuverture is in being caught
between two realities: One is the potential and universal claims of the Enlightenment and its embodiment in revolutionary France. The other is the
actual and particular claims of Africans to the same freedom as their French
counterparts. A product of the French revolution, LOuvertures ideological
self-fashioning was constrained by the terrain in which his imagination of the
Haitian revolution emerged (ibid: 129). The choices he faced were either a
return to slavery or a future without France. He could not influence the conditions informing these options, but had to make his choices within the same.
LOuverture was undone, according to Scott, because of his blindness to the
fact that the supposed universal ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity
were in fact racialized, conditioned by white supremacy (ibid: 290). Thus
colonial power circumscribed the conceptual and institutional conditions
under which the slaves were obliged to fight for freedom (ibid: 119). This
paved the way for the postcolonial impasse, wherein colonial structures and
subjectivities were inscribed in new ways in the postcolonial world. Scott
reads the Haitian revolution less as a Romantic narrative of anticolonial
overcoming than as a tragedy of colonial modernity (ibid: 167), which inheres in the fact that we are obliged by the inescapably modern conditions of
our postcolonial predicament. LOuverture as the martyred hero of the slave
revolutions is a symbol of how longings for anti-imperialist emancipation
have lost their purchase in the postcolonial problem-space (ibid: 3) that is
marked by impossible choices (ibid: 167).
Scott unpacks the incommensurability of anti-colonial idioms of resistance
and hope with the postcolonial disenchantment. It is imperative to rethink our
understanding of change and transformation by reposing the question of the
past that moves away from a romantic narrative of the resistance of the oppressed. However inspiring the efforts of postcolonialisms will to resist
may be, it obscures from paying attention to the oppressive practices, institutions, and structures that persist in the postcolonial tragic times (ibid: 131).
We must seek freedom in the very technologies, conceptual languages and
institutional formations in which modernitys rationality sought our oppression (ibid: 168). The failure of decolonization that grew out of aspirations of
sovereignty as self-determination (ibid: 57) confronts us with the problem of
postcolonial oppositional criticism: whom and what should it be directed
against? What should be the grammar of this critique? The paradoxical inscriptions of pasts within the present draw attention to the contingencies within freedom, the trace of failure within success (ibid: 169). Unpacking the
enigma of the Enlightenment, its recalcitrant ambiguity, the collocation of
vision and blindness, knowledge and ignorance [] the irrepressible illusive-
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Nikita Dhawan
ness of the Enlightenment (ibid: 170), Scott informs us that the gift of enlightened self-consciousness is accompanied with the legacy of disenchantment. The moral-political predicament of the postcolonial present, drained of
the fervor of the anti-colonial revolution as well as the euphoria of postindependence, is confronted with the intractable dilemmas of modernity (ibid:
172). With the bankruptcy of postcolonial regimes, there is loss of the momentum that once animated the anti-colonial imaginings (ibid: 1).
Certain anti-colonial critics reject the Enlightenment as a colonization of
the mind and instead envision decolonization as a return to local
knowledge systems embedded in traditional cosmologies. They call for the
dismissal of Enlightenment-derived narratives that made history not a story of
reason, progress, prosperity, freedom, liberation, equality, or justice, but
rather a record of imperialism, colonialism, slavery, racism, sexism, domination, genocide, and exploitation. Against this position Scott raises the questions: What is the connection between, on the one hand, the indispensability
of Enlightenment to the resistance of domination and, on the other hand, the
costs of Enlightenment thinking? If the price of the Enlightenment was a
certain disenchantment of the world, what is the cost of re-enchantment?
The fatal gift of the Enlightenment exacts a price, which simultaneously enables and disenables, strengthens and weakens. The script of the Enlightenment is both familiar and yet elusive (ibid: 171). The postcolonial world has
simultaneously succeeded and failed in meeting the challenge of the Enlightenment, whose inheritance cannot be rejected, but must simply be negotiated.
We cannot not be conscripts of Enlightenment, even though we are in a subordinate place within it (ibid).
The challenge is to unsettle and subvert the mastering ambitions of the
Enlightenment without a simple rejection of its claims. Foucault recommends
that we recognize that insofar as we are historically determined by the Enlightenment, it remains unavoidably one of the conditions of the analysis of
ourselves (Foucault 1984: 45). Following Kant, he views the Enlightenment
as an attitude that does not command loyalty to its doctrinal elements, but
rather the permanent critique of its rationalities (ibid: 42, cf. Butler 2009).
Our paradoxical relation to the Enlightenment emerges from the conundrum
that our mode of critique as well as our constitution as critical subjects is
itself a legacy of the Enlightenment. Caught between instrumental one-sided
reason and the enabling critical judgment, the challenge we face is in holding
on to the contradictions of Enlightenment in a productive tension. The lures
and limits of Enlightenment, its gift and curse, are inseparable, its legacy
demands costs that cannot be evaded (Scott 2004: 189). What we need is to
develop a patience of paradox (ibid: 220) and an acknowledgement that the
colonial past may never let go (ibid: 220). If the former slaves have become
conscripts of the Enlightenment, reinforcing its coercive legacy, the question
is what is the direction of postcolonial critique?
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Nikita Dhawan
How is one to learn to love a child of rape, an act of violence? Spivak advocates the ab-use of the Enlightenment (ab in Latin is from below) (2007b:
219). This is neither a misuse, nor an abuse, but a critical relation to the structures that we so intimately inhabit. She remarks that when oppressed minorities ask for civil rights and political rights, they are making a demand within
what we call Enlightenment discourse. Thus, rather than any wholesale rejection of the Enlightenment as dangerous and in bad faith, she recommends
using it from below (2007b: 181):
In order to make its good structures habitable by all, I must open the Enlightenment to
what it was obliged to exclude, but not in an uncritical way (2007a: 259).
71
the human workers obsolete. The saboteur aims to subvert through obstruction and disruption, through intentionally withdrawing efficiency. Sabotage
was adopted by the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) of France in 1897
as a recognized weapon for the workers in their method of conducting fights
on their employers to gain negotiating power. The strategy was received skeptically by the workers; while some questioned its morality, others denounced
it as cowardice. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1916: 1) explains that its necessity is
its justification for it being moral. In contrast to capitalist sabotage, which
aims at the good of the few, the workers sabotage is for the benefit of the
many (ibid: 11). As a deliberate interference or creative reconfiguration of
work assignments, sabotage sometimes draws on the law, abiding by the rules
and other times breaks the law (ibid: 22). Gurley Flynn gives the example of
the worker who takes a vital part of the engine with him, making it impossible
to operate the machine (ibid: 25). According to her, sabotage is absolutely
necessary for the workers, even as it is not definable because it is in the process of making (ibid: 35). In contrast to boycott and general strike, which is
not always feasible due to conditions of extreme misery and disorganization,
sabotage, which the Glasgow dock workers called ca canny (go slow), is a
tactic to make the employer vulnerable, thereby rewriting the dominant script
between capital and labor, which renders the worker the agent of production
and not merely victim of capitalism. Work continues but according to the
terms set by the workers not the masters. Production corresponds to the
wages rendered.
Spivak supplements the term sabotage with the adjective affirmative,
devising a strategy in which the instruments of colonialism are turned around
into tools for transgression, poison turned into medicine. She explains:
The invention of the telephone by a European upper class male in no way preempts its
being put to the use of an anti-imperialist revolution (Spivak cit. in Alcoff 19911992:
115).
The challenge is to employ the masters tools to dismantle the masters house
(Lorde 1984: 110).
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Nikita Dhawan
Karin Hostettler1
The Masters Tools Will Never
Dismantle the Master's House
Audre Lorde (2001: 110)
Audre Lordes categorical rejection of the masters tools haunts my thoughts
in this essay. Her criticism of institutionalized Gender Studies for its reliance
on racist tools and the resultant exclusion of postcolonial and queer-feminist
perspectives, also voiced by other postcolonial feminist scholars, still remains
valid (Lorde 2001: 110113). The following essay hopes to contribute to this
important intervention. The inherent failure of Gender Studies to reflect on
Eurocentrism, colonial differences, and racism prompts the question: to what
extent is this blind spot rooted in the canonical texts and authors on which
Gender Studies relies? Addressing this question is complex, because not only
Gender Studies but also Postcolonial Studies rely on postmodern, poststructuralist critical traditions. This essay explores the complexity of this
ambivalent relation by focusing on two central topics important to both Postcolonial and Gender Studies, namely critique and anthropology. The essay
seeks to unravel some of the complexities to which Lorde draws our attention
by examining Michel Foucaults Introduction to Kants Anthropology from a
Pragmatic Point of View (2008).2
(Post)colonial thought has an ambivalent position vis--vis Foucault. To
begin with as Foucault makes explicit in his writings on critique and Enlightenment he locates himself squarely in the European tradition (Foucault
1984, Foucault 1992). This is evident in his discussion of two dimensions of
the Enlightenment: on the one hand, he presents the age of Enlightenment as
the era when the task of critique takes center stage; on the other hand, he
identifies critique as an attitude that has informed modernity since the end of
the eighteenth century.
I would like to give my thanks and appreciation to those who helped me accomplish this
paper. My gratitude is especially extended to Stephan Meyer, Sophie Voegele, and Nikita
Dhawan for their inspiring assistance, feedback and support. This essay was possible due to
a scholarship from the Swiss National Science Foundation.
In her study prior to the 2010 German publication of Foucaults Introduction, Ute Frietsch
(2002) pursues a similar approach, but with a focus on gender rather than the interconnection between critique and race, which is the main concern of this essay.
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Karin Hostettler
This essay seeks to address this paradox through a close reading of Foucaults
Introduction to Kants Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View and by
exploring the relation between critique, anthropology, and the Enlightenment.
It also illuminates the central role that Immanuel Kant plays in Foucaults
pivotal book, The Order of Things (2005). The main question this essay addresses is whether critique is exclusively located in Western, European mo-
81
Here Foucault uses men in the generic sense to talk about human beings in general. Later
in the text he mentions gender relations as one area where the experimental attitude of critique emerges.
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Karin Hostettler
83
Hereafter: Introduction.
In this essay, the italicized short title Critique refers to Kants Critique of Pure Reason.
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Karin Hostettler
Whereas pre-critical refers to writings preceding the 1781 publication of the Critique,
post-critical points to Kants later return to physical questions that came after his metaphysical writings.
85
what they can and should make of themselves. This places human actions at
the center of investigation, even as action is understood in terms of the abilities humans receive from nature. At the same time, Anthropology not only
deals with given or actualized possibilities, but also with what humans should
do whereby Kant opens up an ethical and normative dimension. Anthropology aims to improve human abilities and to explore the limits that distinguish
right from wrong action. The central object of investigation is human agency,
which is ensconced in the general environment. As Foucault points out,
knowledge about humans is at the same time knowledge concerning the
world. Here Foucault detects a clear distinction from Kants pre-critical writings, which he characterizes as cosmological. In those texts, humans are one
element among other things and do not have a special status. They are conceived cosmologically, namely, as independent of worldly locations. Accordingly, they have no specific epistemological or ontological space. In Anthropology, however, Kant deploys a cosmopolitical perspective, where the world
comes into question insofar as it is part of human agency. This contributes
towards determining a new space for humans in modernity, as Foucault will
later explain in The Order of Things, albeit without reference to Kant. Foucault (2005: 347) describes the modern human as empirical-transcendental
duplicate: human beings occupy an intermediate space among empirical and
transcendental perspectives, where the thinking (cogito) no longer leads automatically to being (ergo sum).
This brief description of Foucaults Introduction shows that his interpretation opens up a vast field of crisscrossing binary oppositions: epistemology
and ontology, morality and jurisdiction, philosophy and medicine. The first
opposition epistemology and ontology warrants further exploration, as it
constitutes the crux of the matter that must be addressed in order to tackle the
relation between Critique and Anthropology.
Anthropology is fundamentally a self-reflective work, which analyzes human beings observing themselves. Kant discusses the ways in which humans
who feel they are being observed change their behavior. On a more fundamental level, this self-observation addresses an intricate interplay of subject
and object. This indicates the interesting possibility of an anthropological
understanding of human beings that is neither essentializing nor ontologizing.
Or, to put it in Kantian terminology, this signifies an understanding of human
beings as neither pure phaenomena (Erscheinung) nor as simply noumena (Ding an sich). The outcome of this distinction introduced in Critique is
that an object cannot be perceived as it is, namely, independent of human
perception. But human perception itself follows certain rules that reason provides. Humans themselves their bodies are furthermore part of what appears in nature and in this respect cannot be seen as something other than
natural objects. This, however, poses a problem, since Kants ethical reflections conclude that reasonable human beings are able to act freely insofar as
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they can give themselves laws and act according to what they consider right.
This is what Kant understands as noumenal. The challenging question is how
to bring both aspects together: humans as free agents who are nevertheless
part of nature and therefore subject to natural laws.
According to my interpretation of Foucaults Introduction, his reading of
Kants Anthropology focuses on this question. In Foucaults view, Anthropology provides knowledge of human beings in action, namely, beings who
cultivate and educate themselves. Kant does not explicitly reflect on the condition of knowing in this book, but he does build upon the theoretical structure elaborated in Critique. Hence, Anthropology is a fundamental reflection
of Critique, even as it goes beyond Critique without providing a stable foundation for positive knowledge. In this sense, as Foucault points out, Anthropology occupies a transitional place between Critique and transcendental
philosophy.
Therefore Critique is of importance to Anthropology, even though the latter does not explicitly refer to the former. Anthropology resembles the structure of Critique, even as it reflects on this structure. However, it would be
wrong to conclude that Critique is the foundation of Anthropology. Foucault
(2010: 8196) clarifies that Anthropology should be seen as a repetition of
critical practice on a popular level, as it combines common knowledge with
philosophical insights while retaining the systematic features of Critique. At
the end of Introduction Foucault explains these two features. The borrowed
systematicity allows Anthropology to gather knowledge about human actions
in a methodical manner, even as it enables the attempt to build a coherent
entirety. The popularity of Anthropology and its undertaking is grounded in a
common space and common sense that the author shares with the readers. The
text is written in a comprehensible style and invites the reading public to
contribute their observations and examples. These specific features of Anthropology enable people to enlighten themselves and to provide knowledge
about human beings that is easily accessible to everyone. However, as Foucault explains, it is important to note that this knowledge is located in a specific geographic and linguistic area, namely Germany, from which it cannot
be dissociated. According to Foucault, this location does not, however, restrict these findings, nor does it relativize them. Rather, he reads it as a specific positioning in which the human being in Anthropology is also a cosmopolitical citizen of the world. The anthropological truth of a cosmopolitical
citizen is located in language without being time-bound or having any prior
secret essence. Through the exchange between the text and the readers this
universality can be approached. And the popular style of the Anthropology
allows Kant to reach this aim (Foucault 2010: 9596).
In making this point, Foucault demonstrates that he is concerned with
questions concerning the location of knowledge, with the problem of specific
knowledge, as well as the possibilities of abstractions. The following detour
87
through Kants often neglected theoretical work on human races aims to show
that the specific European positioning of Anthropology nevertheless remains
problematic, even though this positioning is explicit and reflected upon.
While Foucault highlights this aspect on several occasions, he fails to provide
a systematic account of its relevance. He also does not connect this Kantian
account of race to his own understanding of the modern human being. However, as argued in the next section, Kants reflections on race deeply influence
his anthropological reflections. The specific Euro-Germanic location of Anthropology implies that white Europeans are given preference in that they
constitute the normative center of possible knowledge about humanity.
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Karin Hostettler
In his classification of the races, he names the third race Schwarze (Kant 1777: B 160).
89
The Anthropology takes up these previous reflections in its second section, which deals with characters. The section which bears the title Character
of Races is, however, very short and does not add anything new to the discussion. Kant refers to a text by Christoph Girtanner, a study which itself entirely
relies on Kants own earlier insights. Thereby Kant merely indirectly reapproves some of his own former insights. Two other passages in the second
part of the Anthropology are, however, important and warrant closer scrutiny.
One deals with gender, the other concerns travel as a way to gain anthropological knowledge.
In the section on the Character of Gender, Kant declares that the purpose
of gender lies in the preservation of the species and the refinement of culture
and society. Especially the character of women is strongly linked to the progress of society. Related to what Kant describes as a subtle game of dominance and subordination, is a more general dynamic that leads to the cultivation of culture. This progress from the raw natural state to a civilized society
ideally culminates in a bourgeois state. Here an important connection can be
found between racial thinking in terms of developing germs as well as a cultural teleological understanding of cultivation. This is at the same time
deeply linked with gendered bodily organization, for in Kants view, nature
puts more effort into developing the female body. Although I cannot do justice to the interplay between gender and race in this essay, even this brief
investigation shows the close relation of Kants racial thinking to his reflections on gender.
Against the backdrop of race theory, there is another passage in Kants
text that is of importance for our discussion. In his introduction to Anthropology he remarks that voyages and descriptions of voyages are important means
of expanding anthropological knowledge, but one cannot access this
knowledge without first gaining some basic insights at home. General
knowledge which arises at home always precedes local knowledge of foreign
places. Home, of course, is Western Europe, where the general human
being resides.
This short discussion of Kants notion of race is intended to foreground a
rather lesser-known aspect of this Enlightenment philosophers writings.
Kants notion of race must be seen as part of a larger-scale Europe-wide debate about human differences and the relations among different peoples. In
addition, it must also be seen as part of an emerging understanding of human
bodies as organisms rather than mechanical automatons. Kants contribution
consists in stipulating, characterizing, and hierarchizing differences between
human beings. It is important to note that over time this discussion becomes
part of a larger project of teleological principles, with the notion of race becoming fundamentally anchored in reason. As argued previously, Foucault
investigates Anthropology in relation to Kants pre-critical, critical, and postcritical thought. Inasmuch as Kant elaborates the notion of race in various
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Karin Hostettler
articles written during the same time span as his work on Anthropology, these
reflections must be discussed along similar lines in their relation to critical
theory. From 1777 onwards, Kants reflections on races shift from a cosmological perspective to understanding the empirical existence of the subject in
Anthropology, as noted by Foucault. However, in contrast to Anthropology,
the reflections on races do not culminate in a cosmopolitical perspective
since, according to Kant, racial features do not belong to the agential realm of
human beings. Kant clearly rejects with full force the possibility that racial
characteristics have an influence on the noumenal part, and there is no discussion to be found about possible limitations in the realm of action. Accordingly, another important aspect distinguishes Kantian writings about race from
the anthropological approach: knowledge about racial characteristics is not
considered in a self-reflective dimension.
Kants reflections on race and Anthropology are highly normative. The
Euro-Germanic location of Anthropology and the possibility of abstraction
from this location, as well as knowledge by and about global citizens (Weltbrger), implicitly accompany racialized hierarchical reflections. What purports to be a neutral abstraction is only possible because whiteness is not
associated with any cognitive or corporeal racial limitations. Therefore, a
dislocation of anthropological knowledge away from Germany or Europe
entails complications. However, both Kant and Foucault are silent on the
possible consequences of such a dislocation of anthropological knowledge.
Perpetual Critique
Foucaults discussion of the geo-cultural situatedness of Kants Anthropology
makes explicit the extent to which the critical attitude that shapes modernity
is indeed firmly located in Europe. Yet, Foucault suggests that, thanks to
language, it is possible to overcome the specificities of this location. Contra
Foucault, I have argued that this solution is flawed, because it fails to address
the imperial Eurocentric assumptions that are integral to Kants race theory
and his Anthropology.
Against this background, I would like to draw a twofold conclusion regarding the issue of critique. On the one hand, in his Introduction Foucault
implies that there is a global epistemic continuity that facilitates common
ground in language as well as possible exchanges among cosmopolitical citizens. Unlike Kant, who in his race theory explicitly dwells on human differences, Foucault ignores how these fundamental differences among human
beings were constructed and implemented during colonialism and continue to
influence contemporary geo-political power relations.
91
Because his Anthropology emerges from critical insights, Foucault ascribes to Kant a special status in his reflections on anthropological thinking.
Although Kants Anthropology is not essentialist, it still reinforces Eurocentric assumptions. These are not limited to explicitly racist statements in the
Anthropology, but extend to its underlying structure, which defines the realm
of possible knowledge about human beings. It glosses over any colonial or
fundamental racial differences between human beings, differences which Kant
does in fact spell out in his race theory. Considering the fact that Kants notions of what it means to be human are universalizations of a European perspective, it is to be expected that when Othered subjects appropriate these
notions they contest the allegedly neutral and normative definitions of human
existence. This involves questioning those definitions by rendering visible the
boundaries in order to transgress them.
A further conclusion I would like to draw is to highlight how the Foucauldian notion of critique enables us to understand the enormous effects of
imperial Eurocentrism. Modernity is deeply informed by racial and colonial
differences, which have a considerable impact on anthropological truth.
(Post)colonial power relations fashion us, inasmuch as we shape them in our
thinking, doing, and saying. It is Foucaults notion of critique that enables us
to question the boundaries of historically evolved human existence and
knowledge in their universal truth claims.
As shown above, Foucault reformulates the task of critique, which no
longer consists in the Kantian search for formal structures independent of
historical events that stipulate the limits of possible knowledge. Instead, following Foucault, critique means a practical and persistent questioning and
transgression of given boundaries (Foucault 1984: 10) that entails a shift
away from attempts to constitute an objective realm of possible knowledge as
well as of the places from which critique can be offered. As (post)colonial
critique itself draws heavily on Western theoretical traditions, boundaries
cannot be claimed from a putative outside a position uncontaminated by
Western theoretical traditions is impossible. As Lorde pointed out in her
intervention, the challenge, for both postcolonial and gender studies, is how
to transgress these boundaries to enable radical change. This would require a
critical practice that enables unforeseen perspectives to emerge by dissolving
the boundaries that define the fields of thinking, doing, and saying, which
shape our subject constitution.
Bibliography
Carey, Daniel/Festa, Lynn (eds.) (2009): Postcolonial Enlightenment: EighteenthCentury Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Jamila M. H. Mascat
Hegel and Haiti, an essay by Susan Buck-Morss that first appeared in Critical Inquiry in 2000, argued for reconsidering Hegels philosophy from the
perspective of a new counter-history of modernity and, as the author herself
would have recalled later, it soon became something of an intellectual event
(Buck-Morss 2009: ix). Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, the book published by Buck-Morss in 2009 as a sequel of the essay, expanded the scope of
her first research maintaining nevertheless the same Benjaminian intent to
reinterpret Hegels thinking and his age against the grain and engaged
extensively with the notion of universalism employed as a conceptual tool
to counter the phantasies of clashing civilizations and exclusionary redemptions as well as to implement an unapologetically humanist project (BuckMorss 2009: xi, 79).
Adopting a different approach from Buck-Morss, who traced extraEuropean influences in Hegels oeuvre, this contribution examines the Hegelian legacy within the French Afro-Caribbean tradition, focusing on the works
of Aim Csaire (19132008), Franz Fanon (19251961), and Edouard Glissant (19282011). The first section outlines the theoretico-political context in
which these authors addressed the philosophy of Hegel (in particular the
Phenomenology of Spirit) and reworked his concepts within an anticolonial
framework. After illustrating how the three Martinican writers appropriated
Hegels heritage respectively through the dialectic of the particular and
the universal in the case of Csaire (section 2), the schema of recognition
in the case of Fanon (section 3) and the notion of totality in Glissants work
(section 4) the concluding section provides an analysis of the literary-philosophical cross-fertilization that occurred between Hegel and the Black Atlantic (section 5).
Hegel in Paris
If the attempt to build bridges between the European Enlightenment and postcolonial studies to challenge the repudiation of Enlightenment in postcolonial theory has proven to be a complicated enterprise (Carey/Festa 2009: 10),
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Jamila M. H. Mascat
the possibility of establishing a connection between postcolonialism and Hegels thought would seem even more controversial at first sight: Hegel, heir to
the French Lumires, notoriously elaborated in his Vorlesungen ber die
Philosophie der Geschichte (1975) a teleological understanding of History,
wherein civilization, following a linear progression, advances from the East to
the West, significantly leaving Africa lying at the threshold of historical development and out of Historys progression.1
In the introduction to Hegel and his Critics (1989), William Desmond recapitulates the many arguments developed during the nineteenth and twentieth century for criticizing or rejecting Hegels philosophy. Among them he
lists the contradictory charges of panlogism and irrationalism, atheism and
religious mystification, foundationalism and historicism, anti-scientism and
anti-aestheticism. However, from the standpoint of a postcolonial critique,
Hegels concept of identity, the Eurocentric teleology underlying the march of
his Weltgeist through History as well as his support of colonialism and antiBlack racism (Bernasconi 1998, Bonnetto 2006) seem to represent the most
problematic aspects. In this regard, Buck-Morss' article Hegel and Haiti and,
before her, Pierre-Franklin Tavars (1992) work on the same topic offer
interesting interventions on the issue. Buck-Morss establishes a previously
almost unthinkable link between the two terms Hegel and Haiti traditionally conceived of as belonging to two incommensurable geographies and
histories. The main thesis plausible but nonetheless refutable of her essay
claims that the Haitian revolution of 1804 a significant world-historical
event during the era of the French Revolution inspired Hegels formulation
of the lordshipandbondage dialectic staged in the fourth chapter of the
Phenomenology of Spirit (1977[1807]). Beyond any disciplinary restriction,
Buck-Morss made this hypothesis philologically and philosophically conceivable which represents the fundamental merit of her research; in other words,
she made Hegel and Haiti commensurable magnitudes.
Though the present contribution follows a similar path connecting Hegel
to the Black Atlantic, it moves in a direction opposite to Buck-Morss inquiry, as it is devoted to the history of the reception of Hegel in FrenchCaribbean literature, particularly in the writings of Csaire, Fanon, and Glissant. Hegels presence in the Black tradition would deserve to be examined in
greater depth, as it is not limited to the works of the three authors, who belong
to the same historical and cultural constellation; hence the choice to confine
the field of this study to them.2 Many things unite these three authors: their
1
2
In reality, all of history [] has definitely consisted of the exclusion of others; and that
consoles me for having been excluded from this movement by Hegel (Glissant 1969: 37).
As Paul Gilroy recalls in The Black Atlantic (1993: 54), many significant Black intellectuals have been deeply fascinated by Hegel: according to the philosopher Cornel West, Hegel
was Martin Luther Kings favorite thinker, while the sociologist W. E. B. Du bois in The
Souls of Black People (1903) engaged in a dialectic re-reading/re-writing of Hegels Philos-
95
ophy of History in the name of Black emancipation and the poet Amiri Baraka wrote a poem titled Hegel dedicated to the German philosopher. The author of The Black Jacobins
(1989), C. L. R. James, also extensively commented on The Science of Logic (2010) in his
Notes on Dialectics (1980 [1948]).
Fanon actually studied in Lyon, where he attended Merleau-Pontys classes and was introduced to the French key thinkers and theories of the era (cf. Macey 2012, Gibson 2003).
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Jamila M. H. Mascat
des Hautes tudes, Hegel burst on the French philosophical scene. For a
generation of young overseas intellectuals, his thought, and in particular
Marxist and existentialist versions of Hegelianism, represented the medium
that allowed them to approach the Parisian intelligentsia on its own terrain
and, as an integral part of their education, it exerted a strong influence over
their thinking and their poetics (Nesbitt 2003: 120). However, although the
relationship that the three authors here considered entertained with Hegels
philosophy was a sign of their engagement with the intellectual elites of metropolitan France, it should not be too hastily interpreted as a mark of assimilation. The position of these Caribbean writers remained to a great extent offcenter, stopping short of a complete absorption into the Parisian cultural context and giving rise to various forms of critical re-appropriation.
From the very beginning, the encounter with Hegel represented for Csaire an
explosive intellectual resource, allowing him to rethink the relationship between particularity and universality by reversing their traditional antithesis.
Consequently, Csaire emphasizes in an interview in 1997:4
Hegel explains that we should not oppose the singular to the universal; and that the universal is not the negation of the singular, rather it is by enhancing the singular that we reach
the universal [] We had been told in the West that in order to be universal, we should
The presence of Hegel in Csaires oeuvre has been explored from several perspectives. In
Voicing Memories, Nesbitt emphasizes Csaires recovery of Kojves dialectical historicism and claims that a certain Hegelian tenor of Csaires works (mainly consisting in
the deployment of negativity and of the dialectic) is essential to his negritude project (Nesbitt 2003: 120144). R. S. Bouelet (1987) draws on the dialetic of lordship and bondage to
analyze the heroes of Csaires plays; B. H. Edwards, in Aim Csaire and the Syntax of
Influence (2005), investigates the influence of Hegels concept of determinate negation
borrowed once again from Kojves reading of Hegel in the Cahier. Here a slightly different hermeneutic path has been chosen. It will, however, take into consideration the abovementioned interpretations.
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have started by denying that we are black. To the contrary, I told myself: the more we are
black the more we will be universal (Csaire 1997: 5).
Stanislas Adotevi's Ngritude et Ngrologues (1972) and Marcien Towa's Lopold Sdar
Senghor: Negritude ou Servitude? (1971) provide critical perspectives on the negritude
movement.
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Jamila M. H. Mascat
and finished in 1939.6 There he explains what negritude is not (Csaire 2001:
35):
My negritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled against
the clamor of the day
my negritude is not a leukoma of dead liquid over the earths
dead eye my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral
it takes root in the red flesh of the soil
it takes root in the ardent flesh of the sky
it breaks through opaque prostration with its upright patience
According to Csaires view, in other words, young Blacks want emancipation, and to emancipate themselves, they need to fight against the assimilators
and the assimilated, thus even against themselves, in order to liberate them6
The text of the Cahier underwent several changes; the definitive version was published in
1956 by Prsence Africaine. For a detailed reconstruction, cf. Pestre de Almeida 2008.
99
The barriers [garde-fous] are in place; the law of identity, the law of non-contradiction, the
logical principle of the excluded middle [tiers-exclu]. Precious barriers. But remarkable limitations as well. It is by means of the image, the revolutionary image, the distant image, the
image that overthrows all the laws of thought that mankind finally breaks down the barrier.
In the image A is no longer A []. In the image A can be not-A (Csaire, Posie et Connaissance, published in Tropiques 12 (1945), and quoted in Edwards 2005: 7).
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Jamila M. H. Mascat
ing (Csaire 1994: 117). Quoting Hegel, the author points out that freedom
and creation only arise when
seizing hold of the object, the mechanical process turns into an internal process by which
the individual appropriates the object in such way as to remove its distinctive makeup,
make it a means, and confer his own subjectivity upon it as its substance (Hegel 2010:
142).
In this sense, negritude can be understood precisely as a process of reappropriation taking place between the compulsory drives to preservation and
emancipation. Moreover Hegel and his Logic are called upon here to illustrate
the idea that subjectivity versus mere mechanicity exists only as a move of
internalization of external objectivity, and to reassert indirectly that colonial
systems by the very nature of their domination prevent the occurrence of such
a process and in so doing obstruct the development of paths to subjectivation.
Finally, the last Hegelian connecting thread that reverberates in Csaires
pages is explored by Sartre. In Black Orpheus, the long preface to Senghors
Anthologie de la Posie Ngre et Malgache (1948), Sartre defined negritude
as an anti-racist racism, equating it with a sort of Hegelian determinate
negation. According to Sartre, negritude is a pure superseding of itself
(Sartre 1985: xlii) a negative and antithetical moment that prepares for the
synthesis conceived as liberation:
Negritude appears as the weak time of a dialectic progression: the theoretical and practical
affirmation of white supremacy is the thesis; the position of negritude as an antithetical
value is the moment of negativity. But such a negative moment has no self-sufficiency in
itself []. Thus negritude is the root of its own destruction, it is a transition and not a
conclusion, a means and not a ultimate end (ibid: xli).
The negative reading suggested by Sartre resonates with the words spoken
by Csaire in his 1987 Discours sur la Ngritude, where he explained that
Negritude stems from an active and offensive attitude of spirit. [...] It is [] rejection of
oppression, [] fight against inequality []. It is revolt [] against what Id call the
European reductionism (Csaire 2000a: 84).
At the same time, Sartres reading allows us to follow another path of interpretation that sticks closer to Csaires text. As we noted earlier, the poet
situates the concept of negritude precisely in the dialectical intertwining of
the particular and the universal, explaining that he is heeding Hegels warning:
It has been long time that Hegel showed us the way: [one should attain] the universal, of
course, not by negating his own singularity, rather by enhancing it (Csaire 2000: 92).
101
To those who blame negritude for indicating a blind alley, Csaire ceaselessly
replies that it has not to be conceived of as an impasse, but as a homecoming. To borrow from the leitmotiv of his Notebook, it should be conceived of
as a return to ones native land (Csaire 2001).
In this regard, Csaires dialectic of identity reverberates the unsteady
rhythm of Hegelian Phenomenology, where an alienated consciousness, like
the tormented Black consciousness performing in the Cahier, by the very act
of negating becomes one that devours the world (Csaire 2000: 85).
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103
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Jamila M. H. Mascat
In the final analysis, the colonial experience puts a stop to the dialectics of
recognition. Fanons discussion, however, suggests that a possibility of redemption exists. Where recognition fails and a state of non-recognition and
oppression crystallizes, struggle is imperative:
For the Negro who works on a sugar plantation [], there is only one solution: to fight. He
will embark on this struggle, and he will pursue it, not as the result of a Marxist or idealistic analysis but quite simply because he cannot conceive of life otherwise than in the form
of a battle against exploitation, misery, and hunger (Fanon 2008: 174).
Thus in the colonial context, a deeper break with the terms of domination is
required if the dominated are to achieve liberation, and violence is seemingly
a necessary component of it. Within Fanons way of thinking, such a rupture
stretches beyond the scope of the struggle for recognition: The anti-colonial
struggle described in The Wretched of the Earth (1963) is a struggle on behalf
of humanity as a whole to counter the inhuman conditions of the colonial
universe and to claim that a new humanism needs to be violently and creatively invented.
What is interesting to note here is that Fanons reconstruction of the Hegelian scheme of recognition is at once a re-adaptation of it to fit a different set
of historical circumstances and a critique of its political limits. Some of his
criticisms still retain some validity even in relation to the contemporary reactualizations of the debate on Anerkennung (Honneth 1996). Recognition,
indeed, presupposes reciprocity; that is, it is based on an expectation of reciprocity. Fanon shows how the arrangement of the colonial world and the
capitalist mode of production that sustains it are founded on the premise of
inequality. In this context, reciprocal recognition becomes a privilege available only to individuals who are already on an equal footing; it does not work
in the sphere of inequality established by relationships of domination. Therefore, the Hegelian dialectic of recognition turns out to be unable to induce any
truly transformational demand; rather, it triggers a mechanism of repetition
that does not allow any subversion.
According to Fanon, then, the fight to overcome these imbalances is not
simply a particular struggle for one category of people to gain recognition
from another, nor is it a battle for a single race to enter a multiracial concept
of manhood. Anti-colonial revolution instead aims to establish a new concept
of humanity from which no one is excluded and with this regard it escapes the
deadlock of identitarianism and expresses a resolute strive for universality. If
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the true challenge facing colonized peoples is the task of liberating themselves and in so doing healing the wounds of the entire world including
this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them (Fanon 1963: 311) , hence the practical foundation
of a new humanism and the concrete liberation of mankind depend on the fate
of anti-colonial struggles that by emancipating the destiny of colonized people and dismantling the structures of colonial oppression achieve to emancipate the whole human race. In this precise sense, in Fanons view, anticolonial revolutions enact the old Hegelian precept that had been already
embraced by Csaire, whereby the accomplishment of universality meaning: universal freedom must rely on the enhancement of enrooted singularities meaning: rebellions of the wretched. In such a context, where only
violence may be an instrument and a guarantee for the re-invention of the
human, Fanons political discourse resounds the Hegelian emphasis on lifeand-death struggle (der Kampf auf Leben und Tod) that we encountered
earlier in the pages of the Phenomenology. Nonetheless, in Fanons urgent
call to arms, the cruel inescapable dichotomy that animates Hegels conflict
shifts from the universe of recognition among human beings to the horizon
of re-creation of humanity, so that the ordinary dialectics of Anerkennung
end up being absorbed into the dialectical palingenesis of mankind.
Edouard Glissant arrived in France in 1946, the same year as Fanon, to pursue his university studies. He registered at the Sorbonnes Faculty of Philosophy, received his licence in 1953 and was then awarded a Diplome dtudes
Suprieures with a dissertation written under the supervision of the philosopher Jean Wahl, the author of Le Malheur de la Conscience Dans la Philosophie de Hegel. He also earned a diploma in Ethnology at the Muse de
lHomme (1956) and soon started to attend the literary gatherings of the capital. In those postwar years, Pariss intellectual makeup was changing. Hegel
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Three paradigmatic but opposite readings of Glissants work are especially significant.
Michael Dash (1995), who interprets Glissants oeuvre within a postmodernist framework,
believes that in Glissant's writings the political thrust of earlier ideologies such as cultural
universality, negritude, indigenism, Marxism was clear and that the writer, in the name of
an open-ended ideal of irreducible plurality and diversity for the Caribbean, produced an
epistemological break with essentialist thinking, always keeping equidistant from the
search for the generalizing Universal and from the root-identity path that had tempted his
predecessors (Dash 1995: 2124). According to Nick Nesbitt (2003), however, Glissants
work, by focusing on historical experience, totality, dialectical thought [] labor- and
production-based subjectivity and consciousness maintains modernist continuity. Nesbitt
also claims that while Glissants notions differ from Hegels, his critique takes the form of
a potent reworking of dialectical thought and that his work in fact demonstrates the actual universality of these Eurocentric Hegelian concepts precisely by refusing to limit their
application to European culture (Nesbitt 2003: 171175). Lastly Peter Hallward (2001)
opts for an interpretation that emphasizes the discontinuity in Glissants theoretical output
and identifies a post-modernist shift after the publication of his Caribbean Discourse
(1989), which abandoned the nationalist tones and the modernist aesthetics that had marked
his work in previous years. For Hallward, continuity can be seen in the theme of totality that
runs through all of Glissants work, but whose formulation and treatment vary over the
course of time.
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In other words, instead of tending toward an ultimate and definitive completion, relation is movement and the nature of this untotalizable and inexhaustible movement constitutes the boundless effort of the world (ibid).
In the Poetics of Relation (1997), Hegel is actually quoted very few times (on pp. 16, 21 and
194).
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In the long history of the search for totality, Glissant actually identifies three
subsequent stages in Western thought: firstly, the thinking of territory and of
the self (ontological, dual); secondly, the thinking of voyage and of the
other (mechanical, multiple); and lastly a third stage that inaugurates the
thought of errantry and totality, giving rise to relational, dialectical thinking (Glissant 1997a: 18). The latter would be the age we live in.
The author reminds us that errantry occurs when national and cultural fabrics, once pictured in monolithic identitarian terms, are deconstructed and
when one abandons the horizon of what he calls an arrow-like nomadism (a
teleological nomadism of expansion and invasion) in favor of what he defines
as a circular (i. e., errant) nomadism of relation. Errantry, indeed, establishes a unique kind of totality whereby the unity of the whole has for consequence the nullity of dualisms (Glissant 1969: 106), and the possibility of
performing multiple connections in the framework of a new poetics of relation. Thus relation, in opposition to the binary matrix of difference and sameness, turns into a centerless process of totalization, rejecting both the totalitarian drive for the unique root and the temptation of the One-Whole as forms of
identity thinking.
In the 1970s, while Glissant was developing his reading of alienation in
the Antilles, he worked out the concept of antillanit, which he later abandoned and in part even rejected. Unlike negritude, antillanit does not
postulate a return to origins, as Glissant believed that origins always imply
dispossession. Grafting his notion of d-tour onto Csaires idea of re-tour,
Glissant freed the tour the movement from a unilateral confinement to its
source, claiming for a return which is not a comeback but rather a suspension upon a point of entanglement (Glissant 1989: 2526). In the following years, the historico-geographical model of Caribbean experience was
transfigured conceptually through the thought of creolization the suffix of
the term describing it as a process rather than as an inert essence which
serves as an archetype for imagining the totality of the Tout-monde. In a
world pictured as an archipelago of cultures, historic singularity and errant
contamination interact with each other. And whats an archipelago, anyway?, the author wonders. The archipelago is errant and in the archipelago, he adds meaningfully, dispersion becomes a form of recollection (Glissant 1997b: 237238). Relation connects and exchanges singularities within
the whole through dispersion rather than synthesis. In Glissants words:
109
[r]elation ties, relays, relates. Indeed it doesnt relate something to something else, but the
whole to the whole. In this way, the poetics of relation realizes the diverse (Glissant 2005:
50).
110
Jamila M. H. Mascat
Postcolonial Cannibalism
The presence of Hegel in the works of Fanon, Csaire, and Glissant is telling,
not only because the traces of his thought in these authors texts transcend the
confines of simple erudite quotations, but also and most importantly because the type of operation they conduct on Hegels works reveals a process
of theoretical re-appropriation which entails fruitful implications. Csaire
develops the idea of negritude according to a Hegelian logico-phenomenological model; Fanon draws on Hegels dialectics to illustrate the peculiar
dynamics that permeate the colonized world; Glissant elaborates his poetics
of relation and his discourse of totality, presupposing Hegels framework as
a bad example.
What occurs in each of these contexts is not a simple exercise of philosophical re-visitation, rather it is a more substantial gesture which resonates
with a political and existential stance that, paraphrasing Nesbitt, we might call
intellectual cannibalism (Nesbitt 2003: 118). As it has been noted by Nicole
Simek in her article Hungry Ironies in the French Antilles, hungers capacity
to evoke both material suffering and immaterial desire has given it a prominent role in French Caribbean literature (Simek 2011: 107). In a review published in issue 4 of Tropiques (1942) and significantly entitled Misre dune
Posie. John Antoine-Nau, Suzanne Csaire, Aims wife, claims that true
Martinican poetry must be anti-exotic precisely the opposite of hammock,
sugar-and-vanilla literature which was popular at that time concluding that
Antilles poetry will be cannibal or it will not be [La posie antillaise sera
cannibale ou ne sera pas] (Csaire 1978: 4850).
A similar metaphor can be used to describe the commitment of the three
authors discussed in this essay towards Hegels philosophy. If what was at
one time considered as the summa of Western philosophical thought represents for them a key to access the French intellectual milieu, it is also true that
in each case their engagement with the German thinker is the result of an
operation of theoretical cannibalism. Antithetical to metropolitan epistemic
violence (Spivak 1999: 269), postcolonial cannibalism emerges here as the
complex result of two opposing attitudes that reflect the intrinsically ambivalent position of the inhabitants of the French Antilles who are French but
dOutre-mer (Overseas), Black Europeans living in the Caribbean. The
metropolitan existence of the three young students from Martinique is in fact
conditioned on the one hand by a double process of assimilation being assimilated to an alien context requires assimilation of the alien context and
on the other hand by a resolute anti-colonial determination that permeates all
their writings. Borrowing another image of Hegels, we might stress that the
intellectual alienation (Entusserung) that they experience culminates with an
111
Through the cannibalizing gesture of the three writers, Hegels thought enters
a new shape of Spirit: it ends up being displaced to remote conceptual constellations and mobilized in the service of negritude, the anti-colonial revolution and the poetics of relation. Such a violent and enthusiastic intellectual
voracity allows Csaire, Fanon, and Glissant to establish a rapport of destructive complicity to paraphrase Spivak10 with Hegels philosophy. In
Spivakian terms, in fact, a constructive complicity is the only theoretical
option available for the postcolonial perspective in order to deal with the
heritage of the past and the cultures of the present, and to avoid the mere
alternation of accusations and excuses (Spivak 1999: 34). In the case of
the three Martinican authors, this complicity becomes destructive inasmuch
as the rapport of proximity which they establish with Hegels writings produces a disruptive twist that denaturalizes the Hegelian dialectic and reorients its very functionality. At the same time, in the works of Csaire, Fanon
and Glissant, destruction remains complicit and turns into deconstruction,
critically preserving Hegels traces instead of simply rejecting them. Thus
destructive complicity as an instrument of cannibal acquisition echoes to
some extent the same move of Hegels Aufhebung that still has in itself,
therefore, the determinateness from which it derives (Hegel 2010: 81). The
strategy of intellectual cannibalism, and the unexplored possibilities that lie at
its core, may therefore suggest new paths for postcolonial theory and ongoing
processes of cultural decolonization with the aim to sublate the legacy of
humanism and universalism in order to re-create new humanistic assemblages and to re-invent new paradigms of universalizability (Muthu 2009:
266).
10
In Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak affirms that the task of postcolonial critique is
to develop a constructive rather than disabling complicity between our positions and theirs
[Kant, Hegel and Marx] (Spivak 1999: 34).
112
Jamila M. H. Mascat
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I would like to thank Sundhya Pahuja and Dianne Otto, Institute for International Law and
the Humanities, University of Melbourne.
The word Holocaust (lat.) means human sacrifice invoking purification through fire.
Meanwhile, the Hebrew word Shoah can be translated as destruction. The term Holocaust has been the subject of academic and political debates. It is insofar a problematic
term as it carries a religious connotation, which some interpret as the implicit justification
for the genocide. The word Shoah, on the contrary, alludes to the intended extermination
of the European Jews (see also Traverso 1999: 78)
116
condemns theories that place the suffering of Jews above those of the American Slaves and vice versa. He states that both historical experiences are deeply evil, albeit in radically different ways.
Against this background, the description of the Shoah as a rupture in civilization (Zivilisationsbruch) (Diner 1988) seems unconvincing. If the Holocaust was an unprecedentedly violent event, it was certainly not because enlightened people acted in a barbaric way for the first time in history. Rather, what was unprecedented was the factorized system of mass murder and
the fact that the genocide took place on European territory and not in its overseas colonies. Irrespective of ones position vis--vis the uniqueness thesis
regarding the Holocaust (cf. Piper 1987), the uncanny and complex relation
between modernity and genocide seems self-evident. Later genocides, for
instance those committed in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, strengthen the
arguments about the potentiality of terror implicit in modernity and the Enlightenment as they remind us that genocide and terror are neither a thing of
the past nor something that only happens outside Europe (see Jalui 2008).
Auschwitz is, alas, neither the first nor the last instance of evil in the world.
In what follows, I want to trace some of the entanglements of historical
violence and modernity/Enlightenment. Furthermore, following Theodor W.
Adorno and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, I will share some scattered thoughts
on the crucial role that education can play in the aftermath of historical violence to render possible non-dominant futures.
Yehuda Bauer (2013: 688) argues that unprecedented is not to be confused with
unique. He is of the opinion that the Nazi horrors were not really unique but unprecedented: Was the genocide of the Jews, which we call the Holocaust, in some ways different
from the other tragedies? Was it not parallel? Actually, it was both. To call it unique appears to be inappropriate, but, more properly, it should be thought of as unprecedented in
some crucial aspects.
Uncanny Entanglements
117
Goldhagen 1997)? And the most challenging question: What to do after the
experience of political evil?
After decades of critical inquiry and scholarship, the aforementioned
questions still feel disturbing and remain unresolved. In response to this discomfort, one either tends to circumvent the questions or to mechanically
reiterate already established answers to some of the questions in a mantra-like
manner, so as to reassure oneself that this was a lapse never to be repeated
again at least not in the civilized world. Nonetheless, entering this field of
debate resembles entering a maze: It is easy to get in, but there is no easy way
out. We continue to struggle with the core issue of how to comprehend the
Enlightenment, modernity, and its legacies. From Theodor W. Adorno to
Judith Butler, from Hannah Arendt to Jacques Derrida, from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Emmanuel Lvinas to Giorgio Agamben, to name just a few,
critical thinkers continue to struggle with reason after evil and the consequences of historical violence for humanity as well as for the humanities.
Already in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1962 [1951]) Arendt remarks
on the continuities of colonial and Nazi imperialism. For instance, she draws
attention to the presence of concentration camps built in the late nineteenth
century by the Spanish in Cuba during the Ten Years War (18681878) and
by the British during the Second Boer War (18991902) in present-day South
Africa (see also Hyslopa 2011). For Arendt, as Seyla Benhabib remarks,
antisemitism had to be understood not in isolation, but in the context of a
crisis of Western civilization that far exceeded the importance of the Jewish
Question (Benhabib 2010: 225). Such insights notwithstanding, efforts to
link colonialism and the Third Reich are still perceived as a provocation by a
number of scholars, especially by historians: The German historian Jrgen
Zimmerers (2011: 9) claim that the first genocide of the twentieth century
was committed against the Hereros and Namas in 1904 in the German colony
of Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia), evoked hostile responses from
his colleagues, especially in Germany. Although Zimmerer in no way conflates the two chapters of historical violence and substantiates his claim by
drawing on renowned scholars like Arendt, Csaire, and W. E. B. Du Bois to
highlight the continuities and discontinuities between the two events, the
attacks on him have been relentless. The very late reception of postcolonial
theory in Germany can be read as another symptom of the same conundrum.
Efforts to analyze the continuities and entanglements between German colonialism and Nazi imperialism are disapproved of. Since the German Historians Controversy (Historikerstreit) in the 1980s, it is considered objectionable to draw connections between the Shoah and other genocides and/or historical violences (Zimmerer 2011: 140171), especially because the uniqueness
thesis renders it difficult if not impossible to relate the Shoah to evils that
predated it. The Historikerstreit was prompted by an article The past that
won't go away by the historian Ernst Nolte in the conservative newspaper
118
Rhineland Bastards was a derogatory term for the Afro-German children of white German
mothers and black soldiers during the occupation of the Rhineland during the First World
War (see Campt 2005: 1928).
Uncanny Entanglements
119
During the Second World War, Otto Adolf Eichmann was responsible for organizing the
railroad transportation of Jews to the concentration camps in Eastern Europe. While Eichmann was not one of the master minds of the Final Solution, he was one of the highestranking Nazis, whose duties, after the Wannsee Conference in 1942, consisted of organizing
the extermination of the European Jews. After the defeat of Germany in the Second World
War, he fled to Argentina, where he was captured by Mossad agents in 1960 and taken to Israel to face trial on multiple criminal charges, including crimes against the Jewish people
and crimes against humanity (cf. Segev 2000: 323366).
120
The notion of crimes against humanity6 was one of the central concepts
introduced during the Nuremberg trials in 1946.7 According to the legal theorist David Luban, the term was first invoked in 1915 to denounce Turkeys
genocide against the Armenians as crimes against civilization and humanity
(2004: 86). Interestingly, at that time, it was the United States that objected
with the argument that the so-called laws of humanity had no specific content (ibid), resulting in the proposal to persecute the Turkish perpetrators
being abandoned.8
In Lubans (2004: 94) view, the evil of the Holocaust was the horrific
novelty of the twentieth century: politically organized persecution and slaughter of people under one's own political control. As Luban illuminates, law
traditionally differentiates
between crimes against persons, crimes against property, crimes against public order,
crimes against morals, and the like. Here, the idea is to supplement the traditional taxonomy of legally protected values property, persons, public order, morals by adding that
some offenses are crimes against humanness as such (ibid: 87).
It was in fact the British Jewish law professor Hersch Lauterpacht who delineated the three
crimes that formed part of the Nuremberg principles: crimes against peace, war
crimes, and crimes against humanity. All three concepts became crucial for the further
development of international criminal law.
The legal basis for the jurisdiction of the court was defined by the Instrument of Surrender
of Germany. Political authority for Germany had been transferred to the Allied Control
Council which, having sovereign power over Germany, could choose to punish violations of
international law and the laws of war.
According to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague, crimes against humanity
are defined as extensive or systematic attacks directed against any civilian population. This
includes extermination, enslavement, torture, rape, enforced sterilization, persecution
against an identifiable group, or other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally
causing great suffering or serious bodily or mental injury (International Criminal Court
2013).
Similarly, during the Spanish Inquisition, Jews were expected either to convert to Catholicism or to leave the country. But de facto the authorities never trusted Jewish converts, who
were derogatorily called marranos, a term of abuse which means pig and dirty in Span-
Uncanny Entanglements
121
The first step in the committing of crimes against humanity usually is the
symbolic as well as factual expulsion of certain groups from the political
community of citizens and often also from the state territory.10 For instance,
being Jewish, having Jewish family members or being a Sinti resulted in the
expulsion from the category of citizen into the Other and the enemy.
The Nuremberg Laws (1935) on Citizenship and Race clearly state in article 4: A Jew cannot be a citizen of the Reich. He cannot exercise the right to
vote; he cannot hold public office. As Luban remarks:
Instead of humanity, there is only us and them, friend and enemy, and the destruction of the
enemy is the ultimate meaning of politics. In Arendts diagnosis, precisely this outlook
paved the way to crimes against humanity in a very literal sense (Luban 2011: 8).
This has historical parallels with the Spanish Inquisition (14781821) and the
infamous Valladolid debate (15501551) between Juan Gins de Seplveda
and Bartolom de las Casas about the legitimacy of slavery, the encomiendas
system,11 and the killing of indigenous people in the Spanish colonies. For
Seplveda, the Indians were irrational and inferior, making them in his view
slaves by nature. The renowned humanist, philosopher and theologian insisted
that the Spanish colonizers had the legitimate right to use arms against those
defying their enslavement. Contrary to Seplveda, Las Casas, the first archbishop of Chiapas, evocatively argued that the Indians were civilized and that
the peaceful conversion of the natives was the appropriate approach. In his
earlier account of the destruction of the Indies, he depicts the unjust conduct
of the Spaniards vis--vis the indigenous people, accusing the colonizers of
being inhuman and causing great losses to the indigenous population. His
report contributed to the establishment of New Laws in 1542, which prohibited the enslavement of the indigenous people and ultimately led to the Valladolid debate (cf. Las Casas 1993 [1552]).12 The debate shows how philosophical and theological arguments served to dehumanize indigenous populations and, consequently, to legitimize violence, murder, and enslavement
10
11
12
ish and which referred to (forced) converts from both Judaism and Islam, as both religions
prohibited the consumption of pork. Although they converted to Christianity under threat of
persecution, they were suspected of secretly practicing Judaism or Islam.
This is also a way new communities are formed.
According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (2013), the encomienda was a legal system, by
which the Spanish crown attempted to define the status of the Indian population in its
American colonies. It was based upon the practice of exacting tribute from Muslims and
Jews during the Reconquista of Muslim Spain. Although the original intent of the encomienda was to reduce the abuses of forced labour (repartimiento) [] as legally defined in
1503, an encomienda (from encomendar, to entrust) consisted of a grant by the crown to
the conquistador, soldier, official, or others of a specified number of Indians living in a particular area. The receiver of the grant, the encomendero, could exact tribute from the Indians in gold, in kind, or in labour and was required to protect them and instruct them in the
Christian faith.
Cf. Benjamin Keen (1998) for an analysis of the influence of Las Casas versus Seplveda
controversy on anti-racism, liberation theology, and postcolonialism.
122
during colonialism.13 We witness here the pernicious link between imperialism, racism and anti-semitism.
Luban interestingly distinguishes between genocide and crimes against
humanity and states that:
whereas genocide is a crime directed at groups viewed as collective entities, with a moral
dignity of their own, crimes against humanity are assaults on civilian populations viewed
not as unified metaphysical entities but simply as collections of individuals whose own
human interests and dignity are at risk and whose vulnerability arises from their presence
in the target population (Luban 2004: 97).
For Arendt, the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis was a crime against the
human status:16
It was when the Nazi regime declared that the German people not only were unwilling to
have any Jews in Germany but wished to make the entire Jewish people disappear from the
face of the earth that the new crime, the crime against humanity in the sense of a crime
against human status, or against the very nature of mankind appeared. [] it is an attack
upon human diversity as such (Arendt 2006 [1964]: 268269).
13
14
15
16
Also refer to the excellent work by Antony Anghie (2004), who explores the entanglement
of International Law and imperialism in the writings on the theory of just war and international law of Francisco de Vitoria (14831546), founder of the School of Salamanca.
Eichmann is the only person to have been executed in Israel on conviction by a civilian
court.
It should be noted here that the role of the governments of Israel, Argentina, and Germany
in the Eichmann case as a political process is still disputed. The journalist Gaby Weber
(2012), who studied formerly classified reports and did in-depth research on the Eichmann
case, for example, contends that Eichmann was not kidnapped, but that the whole process
had been manipulated and the case instrumentalized for the Cold War.
Arendt employs the term used by the French Nuremberg prosecutor Franois de Menthon
(cf. Luban 2004: 87, Arendt 2006 [1964]: 257).
Uncanny Entanglements
123
Furthermore, Arendt argued that the uniqueness of the harm was obscured by
the category crimes against the Jewish people, as this defines the harm done
to a particular group, thereby failing to address plurality as something valuable to be protected (Bilsky 2010: 206207). She did not think as some
commentators of her book claimed that Eichmann was not responsible for
his deeds,17 but rather that he refused or was unable to comprehend their
repercussions (Young-Bruehl 2002: 338).
The crimes committed by the Nazis had shaken the very foundations of
justice in the Western world, and Arendt thought that this called for as a
matter of principle a reconsideration of judgment. Judgment here must be
paired with understanding, even as understanding should not be equated with
empathy in which any type of judgment is suspended (Novk 2010: 483,
see also Benhabib 1988). To understand is not to approve, absolve, or excuse.
For Arendt, understanding is so closely related to and interrelated with judging that one must describe both as the subsumption of something particular
under a universal rule. (Arendt 1954: 383)
Besides the legal problems, the biggest predicament that the trial presented to the court was, as already mentioned, Eichmann reluctance to
acknowledge the magnitude of his terrible crimes.18 Ensconced in a bulletproof glass case for months, he defended himself by claiming that he had
always carried out his duty to the letter. He did his duty, Arendt agrees, he
not only obeyed orders, he also obeyed the law (Arendt 2006 [1964]: 135,
17
18
In fact, she was not even opposed to him being sentenced to death. She writes in her concluding remarks in Eichmann in Jerusalem that the judge should have ended the sentencing
with: Just as you carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of other nations as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world we find that no one, that is, no
member of the human race, can be expected to want you to share the earth with them. This
is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang (Arendt 2006 [1964]: 279).
A juridical problem would have arisen if there had been any evidence that the defendant,
namely, Eichmann, was psychologically unable to stand trial. As is well known, a judge can
only give the guilty verdict in a court of law when the accused is aware of his actions and of
the sanctions he is being given. The question of guilt, in other words, is closely tied to personal responsibility. One can only be found guilty on the assumption that one has a conscience, even if one does not act on it. According to Arendts report, six psychiatrists tested
Eichmanns mental sanity and shared the opinion that he was normal. More normal, at
any rate, than I after having examined him, one of them was said to have exclai-med (Arendt 2006 [1963]: 25).
124
italics in original). During the trial, Eichmann would sometimes describe the
virtues and other times the vices of blind obedience, or the obedience of
corpses, Kadavergehorsam, as he himself called it (ibid, italics in original).
Arendt makes an effort to understand this behavior, claiming that Eichmann
was incapable of thinking, describing him as thoughtless and as a non-person
(Arendt 2006 [1964]: 49). Eichmanns case reveals that indeed a conventional
petit bourgeois might be more than willing and able to conform to standards
of absolute criminality, if nearly everyone around him is doing the same. In
Arendts view, Eichmann was like many others: terribly and terrifyingly
normal (ibid: 276). As a matter of fact, it was mass conformism that kept the
Nazis in power. For Arendt, Eichmann had undergone such a radical loss of
identity as an autonomous human agent and such a radical loss of conscience
that it had become impossible to find him guilty as charged.
Arendt argues that a period of totalitarian rule leads to a radical change in
human nature, with the Nazi rule destroying the freedom and spontaneity of
the human personality, thereby undoing the possibility of making moral and
legal judgments (cf. Arendt 1962 [1951]): 473474). Accordingly, the brutal
crimes committed by totalitarian regimes not only demand a rethinking of the
very idea of justice but also of personal responsibility.
Enlarged Thinking
The banality of evil implies that each of us without exception is capable
of being and doing evil.19 It makes evil into something ordinary that is not
exceptional, atypical, demonic, or monstrous. A particularly interesting aspect
of the Eichmann trial transcript concerns his answer when the presiding judge
asked him to explain his claim that throughout his life he had lived according
to the Kantian categorical imperative (Arendt 2006 [1964]: 135136). Eichmann explained that being forced into a position of acting and living under
authoritarianism meant obeying orders and being subjected to higher powers.
With his free will being eliminated, he was no longer master of his life and
actions, neither being able to freely adopt principles nor influence them. Given that he had to place his life in the service of higher authorities, he argued
that obedience must be inserted into the Kantian concept of categorical imperative. Consequently, he claimed that the authorities bear the responsibility
for his actions. Eichmann called his interpretation of Kants principle the
19
The word banality derives from the French banal which means belonging to a house,
common, commonplace, from the Old French banel for communal and ban meaning legal control, authorization. The meaning of banality has evolved from open to everyone, to commonplace, ordinary, to unoriginal and insignificant.
Uncanny Entanglements
125
categorical imperative for a small mans domestic use (Garsten 2010: 340,
Arendt 2006 [1964]: 36).
Arendt (ibid), who was stunned by Eichmanns arguments, remarks that
after providing a somewhat accurate understanding of the categorical imperative, Eichmann proceeded to explain that he could not live according to Kantian principles once he was in charge of carrying out the Final Solution. Not
being master of his own deeds (ibid), he was unable to change anything
(ibid). Arendt proposes that Eichmann does not simply discard the Kantian
formula; rather, he conveniently misconstrues it to conflate the principles of
individual actions with those of the legislator or of the law of the land. Arendt
concludes that Eichmanns interpretation of the categorical imperative reduces Kants ideas to
the demand that a man do more than obey the law, that he go beyond the mere call of
obedience and identify his own will with the principle behind the law the source from
which the law sprang. In Kants philosophy, that source was practical reason; in Eichmann's household use of him, it was the will of the Fhrer (ibid).
126
stresses the category of sociability.20 In her view, it was sociability that Eichmann lacked: basic forms of imagination were deficient. For it is the imagination that enables us to think of how the world would appear from someone
elses point of view. Kant stresses that at least one of our mental faculties, the
faculty of judgment, presupposes the presence of others and asserts that in the
activity of judging, egoism can be overcome. The experience of beauty facilitates achieving a disinterested state, wherein we overcome the private subjective natural self and become part of a community and common culture.
Arendt endorses Kants understanding of judgment as the faculty of enlarged
thought (erweiterte Denkungsart) (Benhabib 1996: 175). The overcoming of
egoistic, private, or bodily interests allows the individual, in Arendts view, to
cultivate a general standpoint. Enlarged thought can be understood as the
ability to occupy diverse perspectives in the world, to understand the variety
of angles from which an issue can be comprehended and judged. Such a perspective does not point to mere emotions and feelings (cf. Benhabib 1996:
191), but to the ability to think along with (Mitdenken) to think with the
other, to think from different standpoints. An enlarged thinking needs the
presence of others, whose perspective must be taken into consideration. Intersubjectivity is at the core of this idea, with respect for and consideration of
the views of different persons and their standpoints being crucial to enlarged
thought. In a letter to James Baldwin, Arendt writes that love is a stranger
in politics (Arendt 1962):21 feelings and emotions, as private matters, have no
bearing on politics.
In a totalitarian environment, individuals are confronted with an uncanny
and unforeseen series of events that force them to take a stance and make
judgments without the luxury of being able to fall back on a set of rules to
guide them. Arendt claims that the majority of the population in Nazi Germany miserably failed to cope with this challenging situation (Benhabib 1996:
295); rather than finding a new way of judging the unprecedented circumstances, their conscience simply collapsed. Eichmann, to this extent, is a typical case of what human beings are capable of, if the political circumstances
undermine the communitys shared set of legal and moral values. In Arendts
view, in such situations, instead of fighting for moral values, most individuals
conform to the difficult circumstances.
Observing Eichmann in court inspired Arendt to conceptualize the idea of
banality of evil. Arendt (2006 [1964]: 48) describes Eichmann as only being
capable of idle talk, of mouthing clichs and slogans, while being unable to
utter a single grammatically correct sentence. Arendt found him comical, even
as she found his behavior grotesque (Arendt 1971: 417). A man so unremarkable and mediocre that it was hard to believe that he was Eichmann the Nazi
20
21
This view has been strongly opposed by the British historian David Cesarani (2004).
The letter to James Baldwin was written on November 21, 1962, in response to his article
Letter to my Nephew (Arendt 2006).
Uncanny Entanglements
127
monster. The scariest thing about Eichmann was that he was commonplace:
neither perverted nor sadistic, but just frighteningly normal. Israel and the
world wanted to see a monster, but Eichmann, according to Arendt, was plain
stupid and a clown (cf. Neimann 2010: 308, cf. Arendt 2006 [1964]: 287). He
was a bureaucrat, who received orders and obeyed them. He never actually
killed anyone himself and repeatedly claimed not to be anti-Semitic (Arendt
2006 [1964]: 22, 26). Unlike the court in Jerusalem, Arendt did not think that
Eichmann was lying or was trying to hide his real malevolence. In her 1971
lecture Thinking and Moral Considerations Arendt explains:
Some years ago, reporting the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem, I spoke of the banality of
evil and meant with this no theory or doctrine but something quite factual, the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal
distinction was perhaps extraordinary shallowness. However monstrous the deeds were, the
doer was neither monstrous nor demonic, and the only specific characteristic one could
detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic
inability to think (Arendt 1971: 417).
The historian Daniel Goldhagen (1997) proposes another explanation, arguing that many of the mass murderers were ordinary Germans, who were socialized in a profoundly anti-Semitic culture and thus were acculturated
ready and willing to execute the Nazi governments genocidal plans. He
claims that the vast majority of ordinary Germans were willing executioners
(ibid) because of the exceptional eliminationist anti-Semitism (ibid) that
was the cornerstone of German national identity and unique to Germany.
The idea of a murderous German mentality is popular, albeit problematic, as is implies a certain inevitability, wherein anti-Semitism necessarily led
to the Shoah. Moreover, it fails to account for the non-Jewish victims of the
Euthanasia programs (Sinti and Roma, communists, people with disabilities,
homosexuals, etc.) and other atrocities committed during the Nazi regime.
Nor can it explain the collaboration of neighboring countries, who at times
willingly participated in the genocide. Yehuda Bauer (2001: 100) contests
Goldhagens claim that there was a general murderous, racist anti-Semitic
norm in Germany in the nineteenth century. He agrees that there was a
strong and increasing anti-Semitism, especially among the German elites, but
argues that one can neither speak of unanimity nor of an eliminationist
norm (ibid). According to him, it would be too easy to blame the evil of the
Shoah on a German mentality.
In contrast to Goldhagen, Neiman offers a more sophisticated understanding of the evil confronting us. She describes Arendts Eichmann in Jerusalem
as a modern theodicy in that Arendt denies the assumption that evil must be
unintelligible [] [and] intentional (Neiman 2010: 308). She argues that the
misreading of and resistance to Arendts book stems from the scary realization that [i]f Eichmann could do evil without intending it, so could I (ibid:
128
311). Along similar lines, Robert Meister (2012: 146), drawing on Lvinas,
argues that the coexistence of evil thoughts and their rejection brings to light
the contingency of the border between who we are and who we are not.
This confronts us with the challenge: If evil deeds were done by ordinary
people, what is to be done after evil? If evil comes in different forms and all
of us are capable of it, what are the consequences of this insight for our ethical and political practices? Neimann argues that a modern theodicy affirms
that the world can be loved without denying the evil within it. However, evil
must be seen as something explicable without reference to mysteriously evil
intentions. (Neimann 2010: 309).
22
At the Potsdam Conference in 1945 the Allies agreed on the main objectives of post-war reconstruction, namely, the three Ds: denazification, demilitarization, deindustrialization.
Democratization, it was believed, would follow automatically.
Uncanny Entanglements
129
narrow Americanization, was pursued through the use of one of most effective instruments of Nazi propaganda, namely films.23
In present-day Germany, school curricula include an engagement with the
Third Reich and the Holocaust and, to a much lesser extent, colonialism.
There are furthermore a variety of political and pedagogical projects aiming
to democratize German society. Ironically this reinforces the claim that Germany has dealt with its past in an exceptional way and that the reorientation programs have in the end proved to be successful. But as Neimann
reminds us:
[t]he Holocaust was carried out by millions of people with trivially bad intentions like
those of Eichmann, who did not actively will the production of corpses, but was willing to
walk over them, literally, if it advanced his career; the lukewarm well-meaning bystanders
who wrung their hands and retreated to inner emigration as the catastrophe around them
grew; and people whose intentions were often exemplary, but whose mistakes of judgment
led them to actions that produced the opposite of what they intended (Neiman 2010: 310).
Against this background, the role of education in the process of denazification, decolonization, and democratization is more fundamental than the mere
adaptation of school curricula. It necessitates a more elemental intervention in
the production of subjects and knowledge and the discourses of memory politics and geo-politics. These, unfortunately, are not simply questions of the
past, as the challenges of decolonization and democratization are on-going
projects and unspeakable horrors have not vanished from the earth (cf.
Giroux 2004: 5).
Following Arendt, democratic politics demand that
everyone, regardless of their nationality, is included in the political and economic community of a definite State intending to recognize and protect them as their citizens; otherwise,
no human being can discover his/her own place in the world. (Duarte 2005).
However, some of the films screened in Berlin and other German cities, which depicted the
horrors of the Third Reich and the consequences of the war, were openly dismissed by the
German public. For example, the film Hunger (1948) by Stuart Schulberg, which was produced for the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS), caused great furor.
The film opens with a montage-scene of hungry people in different cities. Initially the audience assumes they are seeing immiseration in Germany after the war, but soon realize that
they are looking at starving people in Paris, London, and even in faraway India. Later in the
film, when images of the marching Wehrmacht are screened, the audience became excited.
However, when Hermann Gring, the founder of the Gestapo, orders Canons instead of
butter!, the incredulous audience screamed Herman would have never let us starve! and
We want Hermann! Given the responses, the film was withdrawn from distribution (cf.
Mehring 2007). The reaction of the audience demonstrates the deep impact of Nazi ideology
on the German masses, which was not easily undone by confronting them with images of
suffering and distress caused by the Third Reich.
130
Uncanny Entanglements
131
(2004b: 550) calls ethical imagination, is to prepare the mind to deal with
complex ethical and political dilemmas. For Spivak this entails the ability to
think of what is not there and resist the impulse of only thinking of oneself.
The world, according to Spivak, needs an epistemological change that will
rearrange desires (Spivak 2012: 2). The increasing trivialization of the
humanities (ibid: 288) in the contemporary globalized landscape seeks to
replace this training in thinking the abstract, the singular, and the unverifiable
with instrumental knowledge and informational technology, which may promise material comfort to some, but does not prepare subjects to address issues
of ethical and political justice. But as Arendt already warned us, the inability
and unwillingness to judge entails the biggest threat to humanity:
The manifestation of the wind of thought is no knowledge; it is the ability to tell right
from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And this indeed may prevent catastrophes, at least for
myself, in the rare moments when the chips are down (Arendt 1971: 446).
Along similar lines, Spivak (2004a, b) compellingly argues that one of the
most important elements of education is to prepare the mind for intellectual
performance to deal with the ambivalences and contradictions that marks
imaginative activism:
when we find ourselves in the subject position of two determinate decisions, both right (or
both wrong), one of which cancels the other, we are in an aporia which by definition cannot be crossed, or a double bind. Yet, it is not possible to remain in an aporia or a double
bind. It is not a logical or philosophical problem like a contradiction, a dilemma, a paradox, an antinomy. It can only be described as an experience. It discloses itself in being
crossed (Spivak 2012: 104).
The uncanny entanglements of the Holocaust and colonialism and their ambivalent relation to European Enlightenment make the questions of historical
justice, decolonization, and democratization the biggest challenges of our
times. While none of the thinkers discussed above claim to provide solutions
to these abiding problem, they do propose to negotiate the historical legacies
that we have inherited in a postcolonial, post-fascist globalized world. This
demands persistent auto-critique and an infinite responsibility towards eradicating evil. As I have argued above, the humanities play a crucial role in
ensuring that these (im)possible but necessary utopias are realized. I thus
concur with Butler that critique [] is the measure of the education that we
want to see institutionalized and distributed (Butler 2012: 18).
132
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Ulrike Hamann
Contesting Racism in Imperial1 Germany
Mary Church Terrell,2 daughter of two former slaves and member of the
womens suffrage movement in the US, came to imperial Berlin in 1904 to
deliver a talk on The Progress of Colored Women at the International Womens Congress, where she was the only woman-of-color participant. My essay
seeks to analyze her visit from two perspectives: on the one hand, as a historical event which took place at the intersection of three contexts, namely, the
European feminist movement, post-slavery USA, and German colonialism.
Her talk and dealings at the conference can be thus read as an intervention
into the hegemonic discourses of racism that were prevalent in different forms
in all of the above mentioned three contexts. The essay principally seeks to
examine how the discursive tool of labeling is mobilized to mark a certain
group of people as progressive in contrast to other groups, who are not
eligible for this qualification. A second perspective of analysis will be the
theoretical discussion on how social change can be initiated through the subversive appropriation of discursive tools which actually emerge from oppressive regimes. I propose the idea that social change can be facilitated through
discursive interventions, through a reconfiguration of arguments and a recontextualization of the subjects of a discourse. Drawing on a historical ex-
At that time, Berlin was both the German metropolis of the recently united Empire and the
imperial metropolis of the even more recently built colonial Empire. German state colonialism began in 1884 and ended after thirty long years in 1914. This was the third largest expansion (cf. Grosse 2000: 20) of any existing colonial empire at this point and included todays states of Namibia, Cameroon, Togo, parts of Tanzania, Burundi, Ruanda, China, and
the Pacific Islands of Samoa, Micronesia, and New Guinea. The prefix imperial thus refers both to the Kaiserreich, the German Emperors Empire, as much as to the colonial
German Empire.
I would not have heard about Mary Church Terrell without the outstanding work of the
historian Paulette Reed-Anderson (Reed-Anderson 2000). Following her footsteps and
thanks to a travel bursary from the Frankfurt Society of Friends of Goethe University, I
could undertake research on Church Terrell in the archives of Washington D.C., where she
lived a century ago. I am explicitly grateful to all of them.
140
Ulrike Hamann
ample, the essay will highlight how a discursive intervention is initiated and
social relations remapped through the articulation of new actors.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has recently called for an ab-use of the
tools of the Enlightenment, a cautious undertaking that aims at opening the
Enlightenment to what it was obliged to exclude (Spivak 2008: 259). Responding to this call, this essay revisits the historical endeavors of a Black3
feminist, who already sought to initiate exactly such an opening in the midst
of European colonialism and modern racism. The essay seeks to demonstrate
that despite the violent conditions of colonialism and racism, there have always been attempts to strategically intervene into hegemonic discourses.
Engaging with the subversive appropriation of Enlightenment discourses
about progress in Berlin in 1904 at the International Womens Conference,
the first part of the essay will be devoted to a close reading of discourses of
difference during colonial times in Germany. Particular attention will be paid
to the German suffrage movement, which will be examined through the lens
of a Black feminist from the US. The second section will be devoted to
Church Terrells writings4 and observations on the social practices of difference experienced at this conference and the ways in which she contested
them. In the third part, I will explain how her intervention re-configured the
discursive framework of the Enlightenment.
We must bear in mind three intersecting contexts, which informed Mary
Church Terrell's experiences during her visit to Berlin to participate in the
International Womens Conference in 1904. Firstly, it was a meeting of
Western women,5 most of whom had a middle or upper class background and
were involved in initiating the womens suffrage movement (cf. Ramirez et al.
1997, Lloyd 1971, Markoff 2003). In different countries of the West, these
rights were implemented differently. In the US, for instance, the right to higher education for women had already been granted. This meant that while
Church Terrell had a college degree, her German hosts lacked access to higher education because of their gender. But in the US, Black womens participation in the suffrage movement was seriously restricted due to the racism of
Even though the term black was rejected during Church Terrells time, with the terms
Negro or colored being considered much less offensive than black (cf. Du Bois, cited in
Bennett 1967), I chose to use the term Black in capital letters, since it has become the preferred term since the Civil Rights Movement also referred to as the Black Power Movement (cf. Carmichael/Hamilton 1976). For an insightful discussion on the different categories, see Bennett 1967.
The basis for this analysis are the papers of Church Terrell I found in the archives of the
Library of Congress, Washington D.C., of Howard University, Washington D.C., and her
published biography A Colored Woman in a White World (first published in 1940).
The participants of the conference came from several European countries, including Germany, Finland, Holland, France, Hungary, Italy, Austria, Norway, Great Britain, Sweden,
Denmark, and Ireland, as well as from the United States and New Zealand.
141
their white6 colleagues. Racism in the Southern states not only took the form
of segregation, but was also violent and lethal. Angela Davis indicts the
womens suffrage movement around 1900 for failing to take a stance against
this white terror (Davis 1983). By not taking a stance against racism, by linking the right to vote to education, and by defining the value of women as
citizens in terms of their function as custodians of the white race, white feminists were complicit in hegemonic discourses. While the movement for womens rights in Germany had not yet embraced colonial color politics, Alice
Salomon was not elected president of the suffrage organization Bund
Deutscher Frauenvereine because of her Jewish background (cf. Sklar et al.
1998, Kaplan 1979, Drkop 1984). Church Terrell and a handful of other
Black suffragettes intervened into both US-American and international discourses. They had, as Church Terrell describes it, to labor under the double
handicap of race and sex (Church Terrell, cited in Newman Ham 2005: 7).
Church Terrells intellectual activism for the rights of Black women in the
US, especially their rights to education, and her reflections on German society
in particular on the German feminist movement provide crucial points of
insight into the historicity of the struggles for inclusion and for the rights of
marginalized groups.7
Discourse of Difference
Around the turn of the century, Germany had already been a colonial power
for more than two decades. The womens suffrage movement itself a counter-hegemonic project had yet to take a stance on the issues of colonialism
or racism at this point. The presence of a Black suffragette from the US carried with it the potential to change this, by offering white feminists an opportunity to learn from her critique of racism. Drawing on the discourse of modernity to further the social and economic struggles of Black women in the
US, she simultaneously appropriated and contested the notion of progress.
In her autobiography, Church Terrell reflected upon her experiences of racism as a delegate at the conference. I will engage with this later in the text.
6
7
In contrast to the term Black, the term white is not capitalized, but is italicized to mark
the privileges of those who fall under this category.
Church Terrell was not the only African-American in Germany at that time. The case of
W. E. B. Du Bois, who studied at Berlin University, is more widely known. However, the
focus here is exclusively on Church Terrell, because her visit to Germany is less wellknown, and because the essay seeks to concentrate on the history of feminist movements
and to contribute to a transatlantic history of feminism and to a history of the contestation
of racism.
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Ulrike Hamann
9
10
11
The original letter, dated 27April 1904 from the head of the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, a section of the International Womens Congress, to Church Terrell reads: Wir erwarten ein Referat von Ihnen ber die Lage der farbigen Frauen im Dienstbotenberuf. This
letter is held at the Library of Congress, Church Terrell Microfilm Edition.
In the German version, it reads grausamen, gnzlich unberechtigten Vorurteile (Church
Terrell 1905: 568, excerpts reprinted in Washington Jones 1990: 193).
In the German original: seit drei hundert Jahren aufgezwungenen Zustande der Degradation und Unwissenheit (Church Terrell 1905: 572).
In this context, the following infamous quote by G.F. Hegel is relevant: At this point we
leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no
movement or development to exhibit. Historical movements in it that is in its northern
part belong to the Asiatic or European World. [] What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature,
and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World's History (Hegel
1956: 99).
143
white slave owners, and the fact that ignorance and poverty are not inherited as many believers of racial hierarchies tried to prove but are consequences of larger structures of inequality. Focusing on the historical entanglements of the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, plantation slavery, and
the racism of modern US society, Church Terrell simultaneously appropriates
the discourse of progress, which in her view characterizes the struggles of
African Americans for social equality and civil rights:
[] that in spite of opposition relentless and obstacles almost insurmountable the AfroAmerican can present today such a record of progress in education, industry, finance and
art as has never been made under such discouraging circumstances, in such a short time by
any race since the world began12 (cited in Washington Jones 1990: 195196).
Church Terrell reconfigures the discourse of progress by inserting AfroAmericans as the new subjects of this narrative. Instead of dismissing modernity and its discursive tools per se, she inscribes into them an expelled history, namely the history of racism and slavery. By drawing on the rhetorical
tool of progress for describing the professional accomplishments of Black
women in US society, Church Terrell defies the expectations resulting from
racist attitudes that locate Black women only in the domestic service sector.
By highlighting the educational, economic, and artistic progress of Black
women despite the discouraging circumstances of over three hundred years of
white supremacy, Church Terrell reconfigures the normative framework of
the entire discourse at the conference. The Black narrative of progress is not
mere mimicry of the history of Europeans (see Chakrabarty 2000: 302), but
a tool of critique. She frames the historical crimes of colonialism as inherent
in discourses of modernity, even as she redefines progress as the ability to
overcome modernitys legacies of colonialism and slavery.
12
The original German text reads: Trotz aller unbarmherzigen Opposition und fast unbersteiglicher Hindernisse kann der Afro-Amerikaner heute eine solche Summe von Fortschritten in Bildung, Gewerbeflei, finanziellem Wohlstande aufweisen, wie solche in gleich kurzer Zeit und unter gleich entmutigenden Umstnden nicht wieder erreicht worden sind,
seitdem die Welt steht (Church Terrell 1905: 572).
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Ulrike Hamann
She draws parallels between the public interest in a Black person and the
hunting of a rare specimen. During this period, discoveries of faraway geographical locations and of rare, unknown animals and plants were part of the
colonial knowledge production.15 Her comparison insightfully draws connections between scientific and journalistic findings and the colonial enter13
14
15
From 1889 to 1890, after completing her college degree and before her marriage, Church
Terrell stayed in Berlin for several months to study the German language. During this time
she met the German feminist Helene Lange (Church Terrell: Diary Sep. 22 1889Oct. 17
1889, Reel 1, The Mary Church Terrell Papers, Microfilm Edition, Library of Congress,
Washington D.C.). She reminisces about those times in her biography (Church Terrell 2005:
105113).
She uses the German terms in her English text and translated them herself in brackets.
As Anne McClintock (1995: 2930) notes, the act of discovery was the instrumental
production of knowledge, wherein the indigenous knowledge systems were exploited. The
naming of peoples, animals, plants and geographical regions outside Europe was at the heart
of the making of Empire. The ideological rhetoric of discovery was inextricably linked to
the imperial power of appropriation, a connection Church Terrell was well aware of.
145
prise. It also unmasks the conflation of differences between animals and certain humans.
However, it was a challenge for Church Terrell to claim a subject position in the face of such a curious crowd and its desire to find an anthropological object. How could she resist this racist curiosity?
When will die Negerin arrive? someone would ask me. Havent you seen her yet? I
would reply. She is already here, I think. Why dont you ask some of the other delegates
from the United States? Perhaps they can tell you where die Negerin is (ibid: 238).
Church Terrell chose to refuse to perform her racial coming out. She passed
on the task of identification of the Negro woman to her white US-American
colleagues (perhaps they can tell you). She playfully met those inquisitive
looks and questions that sought to identify the Negro woman with an ignorant innocence, frustrating their attempts to find what they were looking for.
Thus she played the hide-and-seek game on her own terms. In the end she
relented and gave her story to the only female journalist:
Finally, a dear, little newspaper woman came to me and implored me to let her know the
minute die Negerin arrived, so that she might have the first interview with her. I could not
resist the temptation then and there to confess on the spot that I was the individual she
sought (ibid: 239).
But the journalists reaction confirmed her suspicions regarding how her
appearance disappointed the expectations:
Her joy was great indeed, but her surprise was greater. In relating this phase of my experience when I first reached Berlin, I have sometimes told my friends that the natives who
were so eager to see what manner of person a Negro woman would be evidently surmised
that she had rings in her nose as well as in her ears, that she would both look and act entirely differently from other women and that she would probably be coonjinging or
cake-walking about the streets (ibid: 239).
Church Terrell noticed the desire for absolute difference and the fantasies of
an imaginary Black woman that reduced her to a stereotyped caricature. As
Homi Bhabha proposes in his influential writings, stereotyping was one of the
major strategies of the colonial discourse, operating as [] a form of
knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always in
place, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated (Bhabha 1994: 66). Therefore the stereotype is an arrested, fetishistic mode of
representation within its fields of identification (ibid: 76). However, the
strategy of stereotype is bound to fail again and again. As Frantz Fanon explains:
There is a quest for the Negro, the Negro is in demand, one cannot get along without him,
he is needed, but only if he is made palatable in a certain way. Unfortunately the Negro
knocks down the system and breaks the treaties (Fanon 1986: 176).
146
Ulrike Hamann
fellow suffragettes. This white desire and fantasy for a spectacle of racial
difference made them oblivious to other important historical factors. To confront this, Church Terrell began her talk with the declaration that her parents
had been slaves. This, of course, was an uncomfortable and shameful difference not sought by the whites with their curious looks and questions. Avery
Gordon calls this invisible presence of the unreflected crimes of history a
form of haunting (Gordon 1997). The presence of a ghost is a sign that
haunting is taking place and a very particular way of remembering what has
happened. The nightmares that haunt the individual's subconscious bear witness to the past. To understand the importance of the figure of haunting for
colonial memory politics, I now wish to analyze how the question of difference continues to haunt the feminist movement.
In this famous passage, Lorde does not as often wrongly assumed take
difference as a source of identity that has to be nurtured. Rather, she analyzes
the operation of difference in terms of relations of power, which have to be
remapped in order to envision a different society, wherein difference will not
be used as a tool of power but will be socially valued. But this vision can only
be realized by addressing past and present forms of violence, which would
require white women to take responsibility for their actions as well as their
race, class, and gender privileges and face the ideological aspects of the
sisterhood discourse. Comparing Church Terrell's and Lordes differing but
overlapping experiences, one cannot help but notice that while the German
suffragettes were excited and curious about the supposed racial difference,
as embodied by Church Terrell, US feminists feared that if Black feminists
raised the issue of the violence of racism, it would lead to a fragmentation of
147
With this, she shifts the focus back to her own perspective, having addressed
the expectations of her white audience. Interestingly, she prioritizes the
emancipation of Black US-Americans before the emancipation of women in
general, because, as she notes, without the former her very participation at
this conference of womens rights would not have been possible.
16
The German sentence reads: Ich aber weile froh und guten Mutes heute Abend in Ihrer
Mitte, auch aus zwei Grnden: Erstens freue ich mich der Emanzipation meiner Rasse, und
dann der allgemeinen Erhebung des weiblichen Geschlechts! (Church Terrell 1905: 567)
148
Ulrike Hamann
At the same time, she was also aware that the contents of her talk would not
receive the same attention as her performance:
I have always believed that the ovation I received from that Berlin audience was largely
due to the fact that a descendant of recently emancipated slaves spoke a foreign language
well enough to deliver an address in it (ibid: 245).
Her talk can thus be read as an important speech act, as a felicitous racial and
gender performance in the face of the impossible responsibility of representing millions of people of the two continents, which loomed larger than the
substance of her discourse.17
Despite this important intervention in 1904, the German womens movement proceeded to reinforce racist18 and imperialist discourses, missing the
chance to learn from the encounter with the Black feminist perspective offered by Church Terrell. Neither a confrontation with their own stereotypes,
nor the substance of Church Terrells talk about the struggles and progress
of African American women despite the hindrances of slavery, nor their enthusiasm for Church Terrells performance helped them learn a historical
lesson.
17
18
She was subsequently asked to contribute articles to German, French, Austrian, and Norwegian journals (ibid).
See Dietrich 2007 for an insightful analysis of this issue.
149
Renewing Enlightenment
But what kind of impact could such an intervention have on hegemonic discourses? Under what conditions are negotiations with structures of power
possible? Which tools can be employed to rearrange its frames? To decode
strategies of post-colonizing the Enlightenment, the latter has to be understood as a frame, a normative order of discourse. Despite the diversity of its
discursive tools, the ductus of progress and modernity is a key element
mobilized to mark actions, persons, and societies as progressive or backward
in relation to Euro-teleological time and history. By inserting new subjects as
well as their understandings of time and history into discourses of progress
and modernity, postcolonial theorists like Chakrabarty recommend the appropriation of the discursive tools of the European Enlightenment by renewing
them from and for the margins (Chakrabarty 2000: 16).
Church Terrell and other marginalized critical thinkers like her have persistently tried to intervene in Enlightenment discourses by subversively employing its discursive tools. Drawing on key ideas of the French Revolution
such as fraternit, egalit, libert to envision an ideal society to be
achieved through progress and emancipation within the time span of
modernity, Enlightenment discourse provided an important framework for the
intelligible articulation of political aspirations. This discursive framework
was used both to legitimize and contest slavery, even as it produced discourses of race and racism. For instance, Hegel one of the most influential
thinkers of the Enlightenment condemned slavery as the opposite of freedom, even as he proposed that it originated in Africa (cf. Hegel 1986: 125).
He considered Africans, in contrast to the white male self, as full of contempt for humanity (Hegel 2011: 89). He took the paradigm of progress as
a historical indicator for the worth of a society, accordingly condemning the
entire continent of Africa as lacking history and therefore progress (Hegel
1956: 129).
Let us return to the transformation of the discourse of progress initiated
by Church Terrell. The societies she encountered on both sides of the Atlantic
were structured by racism in different ways. As we have seen, in the first
wave of the womens movement for civil rights, racial stereotypes were as
common as apple pie (Lorde 1984: 114), but we also encounter discursive
strategies that confronted these stereotypes and sought to shift the terms of
these discourses. While Church Terrell was confronted with difference by
white women, Lorde employs differences to unearth suppressed histories of
violence and disenfranchisement. Even though Church Terrells perspective
did not manage to rupture the hegemonic discourse in Germany, her voice did
not go entirely unheard. Her experiments with the masters tools widened the
framework of the thinkable and speakable. As one of the founding figures of
150
Ulrike Hamann
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Bhabha, Homi (1994): The Location of Culture. London/New York: Routledge.
Carmichael, Stokely/Hamilton, Charles (1967): Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. New York: Vintage Books.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000): Introduction: The Idea of Provincializing Europe und
Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History. In: Chakrabarty, Dipesh (ed.): Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton:
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Du Bois made this remark in an article published in 1906 in a German journal edited by
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Sourav Kargupta
Introduction
Does the postcolonial suspicion of the canonical texts of the European Enlightenment come from the fact that they provide imperialism with its justification, that they constitute an episteme based on making universals that
disqualifies the postcolonial episteme which must foreground the particulars? Or is it because these texts are read only in a certain way which is fundamentally Eurocentric in its assumptions? Is it possible to read the canonical
texts of the Enlightenment from the other side of the colonial divide to re-plot
them as self-interrupting structures?
This essay tries to make the broad argument that in accessing the world,
the textualities of Enlightenment not only feed the discourse of imperialism,
but also open up a different way in understanding the worlds double bind
toward the European Enlightenment (Spivak 2012: 13). The essay situates
this argument in the register of postcolonial feminism, and in the related concept of transnational feminist justice, which, it argues, must be thought
through but beyond the calculative paradigm of law. This argument follows
certain readings by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak of Enlightenment textuality.
For Spivak, Enlightenment is to not to be summarily rejected, but negotiated with, also because most of the concept-metaphors of the contemporary
world with which one does rights-based politics, the theoretical generalities
which have a clear presence in shaping peoples lives human, human
rights, democracy, to name just a few draw their itineraries of abstraction from the texts of Enlightenment. Spivak has always been attentive to the
danger and bad faith [involved] in a wholesale rejection of Enlightenment
1
Parts of this essay and of its arguments have been presented on different occasions, notably
at the International Graduate Conference 2011, Frankfurt Research Center for Postcolonial
Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt, at the Institute of Sociology, Albert-LudwigsUniversity of Freiburg, and at the Workshop on Gender and Law, University of Lucerne,
School of Law. I thank all the participants, who commented on this argument in its various
forms. This paper also presents part of my PhD dissertation currently at its final stage. The
dissertation, which focuses on the intersections between deconstruction and feminist critical
theory, is written under the aegis of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta
(CSSSC) affiliated to Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India.
154
Sourav Kargupta
(Spivak 2008: 263n2), a vigilance she informs to have picked up from her
continual engagement with the corpus of Jacques Derrida. Consequently, this
essay also argues that in the case of Spivak, it is exemplary how she has developed her own strand of deconstruction in fleshing out this different textuality of Enlightenment, making deconstruction amenable to both the postcolonial and the feminist grain. It is at the site of that very specific work of deconstruction,2 this essay would propose, that the thinking of a postcolonial
feminist justice can take place.
The second key issue that this paper deals with is transnational feminist
justice. The very word transnational has the dual demand of being attentive
to particular located events as well as of thinking of enabling abstractions,
which can gesture toward a justice capable of working beyond particularities. Critical feminism likewise, by its very position, faces the opposing pull
between the two poles: the particular at its very basic: the identity woman, and a certain material presence given to it and the universal the
declared universality of this very signature: woman, as well as of the ethicopolitical projects that hinge on it. In the last few decades, there have been
important efforts in fissuring the apparently a-historical universal category
woman by underlining Other identities based on race, class, caste, or
coloniality which indicate internal differentiations among women (Das
2010: 136). The thread running through these efforts might be summarized
broadly as attempts at interrupting the universal Eurocentric abstraction
(woman) with located bodies (marked by race, class, et cetera). And yet, a
careful analysis shows that these other bodies have ended up constructing
other universals, in the guise of other generalities. Postcolonial discourses
have often come perilously close to naturalizing the fragments,3 the very
fleeting, indeterminate character of which it originally pitted against the selfcertain universal categories. But the crucial problematic is: can postcolonial
feminism epistemologically afford to create its own generalizations? How
does the postcolonial feminist settle terms with the generalities that she works
with? Is it possible to retain certain generalizations and therefore a program
of feminist justice and yet remain attentive to contextual, particular events,
events that are gendered in specific located ways? This essay draws on a
2
Deconstruction typically views its intervention not as a critique but as a work, stressing
the experience of going through the intimate affirmation and undoing of a textual weave.
For more on the work of deconstruction, see Appendix: The Setting to Work of Deconstruction (Spivak 1999: 423431).
I am thinking specifically of Anirban Dass critique (Das 2010) of an existing tendency in
postcolonial feminist discourse of taking the Other womans body and experience as
immediate. The point, however, is not to reject every generality, but instead to remember
the risk of ontologization involved in each act of generalization, affirming the need for it in
any effort at critical articulation. Also see Dass critique of Susie Tharu and Chandra Mohanty delineated in these lines and his detailed comment on the operative conceptual category experience (Das 2010: 135150).
155
Thinking imagination in this sense has a specific meaning, which involves the pedagogic
project of what Spivak calls the uncoercive reorganization of desires (Spivak 2012: 110
118). Taking off from Spivaks position, Das writes: It is the imagination to reach out to
the other [] [it] is a metaphor for figuring: giving figure to the other who is radically
different from the self (Das 2012).
This discussion is from Spivaks recent book An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012). Here, Spivak is more concerned with thinking the grammar of an aesthetic
education, in which she follows Friedrich Schillers reading of Kant in Schillers On the
Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters (Spivak 2012: 514n42), which she calls
a mistake (if one is only attentive to the dominant logic of the Kantian text), but still insists on marking the places in the texts where the possibility for such misreadings arises
and how Kant himself deals with them (Spivak 2012: 19). The reading of Kant that I discuss in the present paper is from an earlier text of Spivak, but the mechanisms of reading
remain the same.
Spivak recounts the event as follows: In 1992, asked to give the first T. B. Davie Memorial
lecture at the University of Cape Town after the lifting of apartheid, I suggested that we
learn to use the European Enlightenment from below (Spivak 2012: 3).
156
Sourav Kargupta
157
10
John quotes from and critiques Mohantys concept of feminism without borders here (see
John 2011 and Mohanty 2003, especially ibid: 913).
Spivak adds that with a logic of revenge and punishment we are not necessarily moving
toward a lasting peace (Spivak 2012: 374). It might be possible to tally her argument in
this speech with her comments on Kants crucial text on Toward Perpetual Peace, to be
found in the Introduction to the same volume (see Spivak 2012: 1317).
Iris Marion Young, even if her position is vastly different from that of Spivak, makes similar arguments when she uses Jacques Derridas concept of the gift as a way of understanding asymmetrical reciprocity, which any act of giving to the other presumes along with
a distance from that other (Young 1997: 55).
A deconstructive reading can be said to be not merely a reading of a text against its grain,
but moreover an affirmation of the marks which present themselves in the text, or of the textual weave and its moments. The work of deconstruction follows the logic of these marks or
moments beyond the pale of the dominant structure of the text. In this sense, deconstruction
is affirmative, it meticulously reads and follows the trajectory of each singular moment of
a textual knit. Spivak reminds us that [a]ffirmative deconstruction says yes to a text
twice, sees complicity when it could rather easily be oppositional (Spivak 1993: 143).
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Sourav Kargupta
But this upper hand enjoyed by reason [] over sensibility is not unproblematically human for Kant. It is a certain tuning in culture rather than a necessary production of culture (Spivak 1999: 12). It is an attunement that is part
of ones being as human and not a matter of learning or becoming (through
education or training), Kultur rather than Bildung, as Spivak emphasizes
(ibid). It is here that Kant inserts the man in the raw [der rohe Mensch],13
(ibid: 13) who is without cultural attunement and consequently incapable of
accessing reason, even if in Kants own formula, this access is somewhat
mechanical and not merely intentional. The raw men, who are without culture
in this sense, can perceive the sublime in nature only as terrible (Kant cited
in ibid: 14) and cannot be summoned to the dominion of reason, therefore
11
12
13
Spivak reads from the German original where she deems necessary, but chiefly follows the
J. H. Bernard translation when it comes to the English version. I have consulted the more
recent translations by Werner S. Pluhar (Kant 1987, trans. Pluhar) and Paul Guyer and Eric
Matthews (Kant 2002, trans. Guyer/Matthews) as well.
This translation of Bestimmung can be found in the J. H. Bernard translation that Spivak
follows. It can also be found in the Pluhar translation in the part of the text referred to (Kant
1987: 67). Guyer and Matthews, however, translate Bestimmung as vocation in the textual
moment in contention (Kant 2002: 141). This translation is very close to the Spivakian
sense of being attuned, since vocation can mean a call or a summon to which someone is drawn.
The raw man would be more literal.
159
160
Sourav Kargupta
rida, in fact, makes it clear elsewhere14 that such a formulation is to be understood against deconstructions proximity to and decisive critique of the Hegelian Aufhebung (mostly translated sublation), which, in its basic, tries to
include the self and the other in a move of progression.
To allege that there is no absolute outside of the text is not to postulate some ideal immanence, the incessant reconstitution of writings relation to itself. [] The text affirms the
outside, marks the limits of this speculative operation, deconstructs and reduces to the
status of effects all the predicates through which speculation appropriates the outside
(emphasis in original, Derrida 1981: 35).
There is no outside to the text, therefore, strictly means that the text cannot
master its outside or the trace of it and not that the text does not have an outside. It indicates that the text is no longer the snug airtight inside of an inferiority or an identity-to-itself and that this thing-in-itself also cannot master
its outside, being rather a different placement of the effects of opening and
closing (Derrida 1981: 36).
I propose that the key lies in the very positioning of the work of reading
which both creates the text and therefore perceives the trace of the outside.15
Like any reading which carries the intention of the one who reads and consequently is not free of the trace of intentionality, Spivak performs an intentional reading here, articulated from a non-Eurocentric position. This reading
asks, what in the Kantian text is that marginal metaphor which both tries to
master its outside and unwittingly ends up splitting open its internal logic to
the trace of the outside (and therefore to the work of deconstruction). If the
answer, in the case of this specific moment in Kant, is the metaphor of the
raw man, then Spivak re-plots that name into a trajectory of other such
metaphors and signifies this trajectory with the name native informant. The
reading that she performs positions itself with deconstruction of a postcolonial kind. It is here, then, that we identify our handle in thinking an intersection
between the ab-use of Enlightenment textuality and a postcolonial feminist
critique.
Thirdly, Spivak is more than aware of the fact that this double-desire, of
opening and closing, of grasping and forgetting the trace that the text performs, likewise, affects any reading, even (her own) deconstructive reading.
Therefore, her reading is not working in an Archimedean outside from
where she can make theory. Her reading itself is another text with constraints of its own. Native informant is a name which reduces radical alterity in the very act of naming, just as any naming is a reduction of an otherness
into textuality. But Spivak takes that risk, in effect making the text of Kant
14
15
In the opening piece of the compilation Dissemination called Outwork, another name for a
preface (see Derrida 1981).
I have discussed the nuances of a deconstructive reading and its specificities in my unsubmitted PhD dissertation, Precarious Objectifications: Ethics of Representation and the
Figure of the Woman.
161
what she calls elsewhere practicable (Spivak 1989: 57).16 Spivak also calls
this the making literary of a text in reading (ibid).
This is a crucial move, which is very unique to a Spivakian style of deconstruction, I contend; a deconstruction which always has a desire to be practicable, thereby departing from a strictly Derridian frame. The move toward a
practice seems to attend to the postcolonial and the feminist demand (if one
considers that both of these names are primarily connected to practice and
politics).
The metaphor of the raw man mentioned in the analytic of the sublime
surfaces again when Kant discusses teleological judgment (Spivak 1999:
19-27). Here, the philosopher wonders about the purpose (a priori principle
of purposiveness, emphasis in original, ibid: 20) of the existence of each
thing beyond mere cause-effect relation which connects things in a chain of
production and survival. Such an argument might end with man at the top of
the chain of consumption and survival, but, Kant points out, then we do
not see why it is necessary that men should exist (Kant cited in Spivak 1999:
26).17 The purpose of man is furrowed, Kant points out, by the presence of
the New Hollanders or the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego (Kant cited in
Spivak 1999: 26). These uncanny figures are introduced by a curious twist of
argumentative prose. Even if the search for the teleological purposiveness of
human existence is given the lie by these figures, they are only inserted into
this argument, says Kant, by chance, or casually, as Spivak puts it (ibid).
Spivak makes a parallel between the textual positioning of these figures to the
foreclosure of the raw man encountered earlier in the Kantian text (see
above). Persisting with this connection, one finds that the raw man is geographically plotted here as existing outside of Europe, at the cutting edge of
colonial expeditions. As the philosophical enquiry into the concept man
gets re-plotted in a Eurocentric writing of the world-map (geo-graphy), the
conceptual foreclosure18 becomes recognizable in the history of the world.19
16
17
18
She mentions this in her reading of the proper/improper binary in Karl Marxs critique of
the capitalist mode of production, where she wants to read Marx against the dominant grain
of his text (she is reading the Chapter on Money in Marxs Grundrisse). Through her reading, she shows certain ethical motives working in the argument of Marx, which are not central to its logical weave, even if crucial to the constitution of that very logic. She writes: To
make literary in this sense, then, is to make practicable. Not, that is to say, to expose the
irreducible self-constitution of the text as self-deconstruction; but to show that the moment
of the deconstruction of philosophical justice is the minute foothold of practice (Spivak
1989: 57).
The Guyer and Matthews translation goes like this: grass is necessary to the live-stock, just
as the latter is necessary to the human being as the means for his existence; yet one does not
see why it is necessary that human beings exist (Kant 2002: 250).
Foreclosure is a term Spivak borrows from the psychoanalytic tradition, which defines a
strategy of the ego in trying to reject an idea incompatible with itself along with the affect
it produces. Spivak proposes that in thinking the constitution of an inside (subjects ego) by
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Sourav Kargupta
19
20
21
rejection of an idea along with its affect the discourse of psychoanalysis opens up to a
mechanism of ethical reading (Spivak 1999: 4)
See Spivak 1999: 26n32 for detailed discussion.
We cannot go into a detailed reading of this important gloss on Spivak, see Carey/Trakulhun in Carey/Festa 2009: 243280.
In the same volume, David Lloyds chapter is more attentive to Spivaks reading of the Kantian sublime (see Lloyd in Carey/Festa 2009: 92).
163
(Spivak 1999: 26). I have already indicated the internal mechanism of such a
Spivakian deconstruction above, which intends not to reject the text, but
tries to make it practicable. I try to chart below how that move can be read
as a move toward what I call a postcolonial feminist ethics.
164
Sourav Kargupta
ready prefigured in the Kantian text. Kant, as discussed above, does not place
the woman at the margin of rational humanness; rather, she is given the
chance of becoming educated and accessing cultural attunement. She is not
given the place of inaccessible Otherness, but is figured as somewhat like a
human in the making. The figure of the native informant, by contrast, even
if rhetorically crucial at the most important moment in the argument, [] is
not part of the argument in any way (Spivak 1999: 13n20). Spivak articulates a sweeping but very important question at this moment:
Was it in this rift that the seeds of the civilizing mission of todays universalist feminism
were sown? At best, it is a recoding and reterritorializing of the native-informant-aswoman-of-the-South, so that she can be part of the argument (ibid).
Put schematically, Spivak is wondering if one can read the trajectory of universalist feminism, which takes the Western European woman as its privileged subject, as an extension of the same Kantian textuality that forecloses
the aboriginal as its other and therefore is complicit with the discourse of
colonialism.22
In countering this discourse, postcolonial critique, even after its turn away
from the colonial elite, might have put the non-European subaltern man at
its discursive helm, but the subaltern woman remains forgotten even in that
construction of subalternity. This amounts to saying that at its secret heart, the
postcolonial text is always already summoned to its Other, the figure of the
subaltern woman, whom it has foreclosed. This figure, who is the constitutive
unconscious of the male subaltern subject, has been doubly displaced, first
by the colonial discourse and then by the discourse which tries to counter it.23
And therefore, as Spivak contends in her now canonical essay Can the
Subaltern Speak?, even within the effaced itinerary of the subaltern subject,
the track of sexual difference is doubly effaced (274).24 If in the contest of
colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow (ibid).
The text of postcolonial critique, therefore, must be re-structured like a
feminism, if it is to account for that Otherness which it has foreclosed even in
22
23
24
This is the point Spivak makes in her canonical Can the Subaltern Speak?, when she argues
that [t]he abolition of this rite [of sati] by the British has been generally understood [by the
colonial discourse] as a case of White men saving brown women from brown men. White
women from the nineteenth-century British Missionary Registers to Mary Daly have not
produced an alternative understanding (Spivak 1999: 287).
As well as by the text conditioned by globalization: the native informant's foreclosed perspective is located in woman's global subalternity, the computing of the great narrative of
history by the shifting currents of global imperialism seem more apposite (Spivak 1999:
89).
I refer to the essay Can the Subaltern Speak? (Spivak 1988) in its re-published and expanded version as inserted in the volume A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Spivak 2012). In
all cases the quotes, however, are part of the original version of the essay published in 1982,
if not indicated otherwise.
165
Is this lacuna also not a necessary darker edge of a thought which remains always as its
un-thought, where the point is not to exhaust all darkness or unthought by hoping to reduce it to truth, but to stretch the ambits of thought to find darker and denser unthought. Thus in his critique of Martin Heidegger, Derrida quotes Heidegger: The more
original a thought [] the richer its Un-thought becomes. The Unthought is the highest gift
(Geschenk) that a thought can give (Heidegger cited in Derrida 1991: 13).
166
Sourav Kargupta
this: how to criticize sati as a performance of a brutal rite and also retain
womans subjectivity and choice, and how to intervene (an act of delivering
justice) without objectifying the woman. It is here that the text confronts the
paradigmatic question, whether the subaltern (woman) can speak.
One notes here that the ability or the act of speaking is mentioned here
also as an expression of agency, which gestures toward a certain form of
assured subjectivity as the locus of speaking. But subjectivity, Spivak tells
us elsewhere quoting Michel Foucault, is not only contained in investigating
what is said or intended to be said and by whom, but also what position can
and must be occupied by any individual if he is to be the subject of it (Foucault cited in Spivak 1987: 242). This I-slot, as Spivak calls it, is a vacant
placeholder or a sign to be assigned (Spivak 1987: 243). This I-slot, left
by the subaltern woman, marks:
[the] case of suttee as exemplum of the woman-in-imperialism [which] would challenge
and deconstruct this opposition between subject (law) and object-of-knowledge (repression) and mark the place of disappearance with something other than silence and nonexistence, a violent aporia between subject and object status (Spivak 1999: 304).
This is a gap from where the woman can neither speak with full intention nor
be totally silent. Rather, she walks the cut, the cut that separates the two
sides of the double-bind in question.
In representing her, one faces the same double-bind. Representations
burden is to relentlessly plot the trail of her flight along the line of the work of
this cut. Representation as such must be incomplete definitionally, but still the
point is to go through the work of it, ethically.
Not representing is not a choice, since the kind of theory which would abstain totally from representation, based on the argument that it can never be
total, would actually run the risk of surreptitiously re-inserting the fully
knowing/speaking subject into the equation.
Derrida, in Force of Law, cautions that left to itself, the idea of the incalculable and of justice can very well be reappropriated by the most perverse calculation, and so the incalculable [] requires us to calculate
(1992: 28). If the fixity of a determined scheme or law cannot reach the
fullness of justice, ever, this is a commonplace that every written law works
with. But law can never lose its view of the transcendence of justice. As
Spivak reminds us, justice is disclosed in law, even at its own effacement
(Spivak 1999: 427).
We can understand the ethical imports of re-presentation within this
frame. Each singular moment of representation, even if it fails, must always
work with and for an unattainable just representation. [T]he intellectuals
solution is not to abstain from representation, writes Spivak, thus emphasizing the indispensability of a law-like structure (Spivak 1999: 272).
One must be attentive here to the fact that in re-presenting specificities of
gender, one also has to take recourse to generalities which would, again,
167
leave certain other specificities unassimilated. When one thinks of interrupting the universal shorthand woman with a category like the third world
woman, then the latter also works as a generality reducing different particular instances of that shorthand third world woman. This is not to say that
one does not need law or what I have tried to call the law-like structures,
but one needs to be aware of law-making as an ongoing process. This is a
work which is not simply mechanical or repetitive. Rather, it can be seen as a
machine-like repetition capable of adapting itself to and producing new
events. Therefore, in its very conception, the machinery of law houses a double-bind, that of the machine and of the event, repetition and mutation or
change. The subject of law cannot fully represent the living, tarrying figures
who go through the experiences of everyday, and yet those experiences themselves remain subject to certain laws of representation (to self and to others).
This gap-within is also described by Spivak as the difference between the
woman and woman: the name and, as it were, the thing, the phenomenal
essence (Spivak 1993: 137). Spivak draws a parallel between this difference
and Foucaults use of power. Foucault makes a short circuit between power
the name and power the thing, she argues (ibid: 138).
The feminist, too, needs to make this leap, while remaining aware of the
obligatory reduction. It is crucial that one consistently takes the particularities
into consideration, even as law-making cannot forget that ultimately its work
is the work of appropriating the particular for the general or for the
name, and therefore one of abstraction and reduction, which is nonetheless
necessary. If a commonsensical notion of justice is about taking all the real
interruptions and irregularities into a pre-figured matrix of calculation, then a
feminist justice in line with deconstruction would be about staying with this
work, knowing the impossibility of ever reaching any fullness of justice or,
in other words, full representation of the phenomenal in the constituted gendered subject of law or in the name: woman. Therefore it is a delicate
distance that this deconstructive justice takes from any teleological notion of
justice, which is indicated by Spivak as also being the difference between
right to be claimed and [double-] bind to be watched (ibid: 124).
Philosophically put, this double-bind works between what Spivak calls the
subject of ontology/epistemology, prompted by the question who acts?,
and the subject of ethico-politics, a grammar of how one must act. This needs
a bit of unpacking. The subject of ethico-politics is a figure to which
Spivak constantly returns, mostly to underline the short-circuit through which
it comes into being, cutting itself off from what she calls the subject of ontology/epistemology.
If one tries to compare and measure diverse specificities of a gendered
situation and tries to put them into a structure, then one must think of a reference frame, with respect to which different moments, bodies, or experiences
can be measured and compared. For Spivak, in deciding about this reference-
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Sourav Kargupta
frame, one takes the all-important ethical step, which, as if comes before any
conception of the proper, or of the normal, or of the lawful. Unlike the subject
of ontology, the subject of ethico-politics must already have such a frame in
mind and therefore go through a certain acknowledged ontologization. Spivak
is only making the point that this minimal foothold of practice cannot be
called ethical unless one is aware of its rootedness in a certain prepropriative26. Since phallogocentric27 law or any other patriarchal structure
works with a notion of the proper (a certain originary asexual maleness), a
feminist ethics must persist with a critique of any such itinerary of the proper.
And yet, even to think the feminist subject of ethico-politics, it must resort to
a name such as that of the woman-subject. It is in the materiality and essence
contained in a definite name or subject predication that feminism gets tied
to an ontologization.
Spivak urges, however, that to be at a remove from male essentialisms,
feminism must be aware of this leap or short-circuit that is made between
ontology and ethico-politics each time one tries to think feminist practice.
Post-modernism questions the unified subject of action/decision or the subject
of law, and yet, as Jacqueline Rose puts it:
only the concept of a subjectivity at odds with itself gives back to women the right to an
impasse at the point of sexual identity, with no nostalgia whatsoever for its possible or
future integration into a norm (cited in Spivak 1993: 124).
One may read norm as law here. Spivak quotes Rose affirmatively, but
glosses her by adding that one must also be careful to account for the irreducible gap that constitutes the right to a sexual identity but is ignored in
giving a materiality to this right (ibid: 114). Any feminist discourse that
covers over this gap runs the risk of foreclosing the other woman, in effect
stratifying the political subject. Is it also not the double-bind of transnational
justice, where such a thought must remain attentive both to the general and to
the particular? Judith Butler in a similar vein reminds us that to take a finished subjectivity as the starting point of a feminist politics would be to defer the question of the political construction and regulation of the subject
26
27
Proposing the pre-propriative, in this sense, is a theoretically necessary step which thinks of
an undifferentiated past to critique any violent difference that marks the present.
Phallogocentrism is the Derridian notion that unites the Lacanian notion of phallocentrism (centrality of the phallus in the signifying chain which structures the symbolic, where
by a short circuit the male sexual organ always already takes the position of the phallus)
with the concept of logocentrism (the privileging of logos or voice in philosophical or
indeed any discourse woven around presence). Judith Butler reminds us how this key
concept can be put to use in understanding any binary opposition where one term is subordinated to the other, for example in colonial discourse. The effort to include Other cultures as variegated amplifications of a global phallogocentrism constitutes an appropriative
act that risks a repetition of the self-aggrandizing gesture of phallogocentrism, colonizing
under the sign of the same those differences that might otherwise call that totalizing concept
into question (Butler 1999: 18).
169
itself (in Contingent Foundations by Butler in Benhabib 1995: 47). I propose that the ethico-political cannot claim a complete separation from the
ontological-epistemological, and in a certain way this ensures its very production and survival, just as subjectivity cannot be thought based purely on the
ethical. This is a thread we must leave in suspense within the limits of the
present paper.
It is difficult to trace even a partial profile of Spivaks various approaches
to the double-bind of feminist ethico-politics. But I would still like to mention
the related distinction she makes in many places between the feminist scholar
who represents, and the women to be represented. The postcolonial feminist scholar, for Spivak, can be that constituted subject that forgets the other
in its haste to claim otherness (Spivak 2008: 176). The scholar is to be attentive to the fact that as a scholar she would always have an unassailable distance from the real, phenomenal women conceived as the Other. On another
register, this same distance would also work between her scholarly self and
her own experiences, which cannot be available to her without mediation.
Therefore, while representing the Other (or herself as Other) she has to take
recourse to a normative structure and to shorthands or names. It is from this
conviction of an ever inadequate but necessary calculation that Spivak sounds
the following program:
Incanting to ourselves all the perils of transforming a name to a referent making a
catechism, in other words, of catachresis let us none the less name (as) woman that
disenfranchised woman whom we strictly, historically, geopolitically cannot imagine, as a
literal referent, [just like] Subaltern is the name of the social space that is different from
the classed social circuit, the track of hegemony (emphasis in original, Spivak 1993: 139).
But this is not merely about naming the Other: woman from a distance,
because that would run the risk of construing an arrogant scholarly subject
too sure of her power of representation. It is instead also about recognizing a
division within. Spivak proposes, Let us divide the name of woman so that
we see ourselves as naming, not merely named, with the im-possible hope
that the possibility for the name will be finally erased (Spivak 1993: 139
140). It is this burden of inadequate re-presentation that the scholar as well as
the calculative paradigm of law must carry. The subaltern cannot speak without mediation, neither can anyone. Speech itself works like a law, which, for
its production, needs both the subjective intention and a prior given structure of mechanicity. Speech works therefore between the event and the
machine, in other words, between the newness of intention and the repetition of the old, a production that Derrida has termed iterability.28 A fem28
Iterability, according to Derrida, includes both difference and identity (vis--vis the
previous moment) in the act of repetition, which is best exemplified in the working of language, but by no means restricted to it. For more on this notion and an elaborate discussion
of the production of speech and the limits of intentionality from the side of deconstruction,
see Derrida 1988.
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Sourav Kargupta
inist justice can be that im-possible horizon before which the calculations of
law-like, iterable structures must go on in thinking a politics or a constitution
of the name woman. Since this name is never to be thought as fixed, but
always in production, in the making, as a work of calculation, feminist justice
is both to be revealed and effaced at each moment of such a calculation.
29
For a more detailed analysis, see also Sunder Rajan 1995 and Mani 1998.
171
hold of subjective choice which may work in spite of the sanctions of power and law?
Even after painstakingly reconstructing30 the historico-textual context of
power and (patriarchal-legal-colonial) sanctions which condition and produce the consent of the willing sati, Spivak is unwilling to fully write off
the presence of the womans intentionality. Contrary to the commonsensical
interpretation of the oft-quoted phrase the subaltern cannot speak, Spivak
does not reject the intention of the widow fully and instead tries to stage it,
testing its im-possibility, even if Mani or Sunder Rajan would like to fully
ignore intentionality as unreliable (matter of conjecture, says Sunder Rajan
1995: 18) or fully conditioned by power (Mani 1998: 97).31 Is this rejection a
result of an all-or-nothing logic, where intention is taken to be validated
only by full presence of articulation with no distance between the scholar and
the one whom she represents, a successful ventriloquism of sorts? Mani, dealing with [e]yewitness accounts of widow immolation, maintains that testimonials of women might call Spivaks conclusion that the subaltern cannot speak [...] into question (Mani 1998: 160). But this critique seems to
miss the point that Spivak is not merely talking about unavailability of archival evidence, but also about the ontological questions of representation, subjectivity, and speech as such. For her, [s]uch a testimony would [still] not be
ideology-transcendent or fully subjective (Spivak, cited in Mani 1998:
158). Although Mani mentions this, she fails to read it. Fully is the keyword here; Spivak is neither negating the intention of the (willing) sati
fully, nor is she reading any speech as fully representative of a subjects
intention.
The staging of the problem of intentionality is one of the most important
elements of Spivaks work, an element which is often missed.32 A feminist
30
31
32
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Sourav Kargupta
notion of justice must work in the way of gathering the fragments that an
intending, fully willed subjectivity misses. However, the feminist scholar
must work within a closure where political action is possible only by claiming
intentionality and agency. This precarious positioning of the feminist critique
has a similarity to the placement of the postcolonial critique.
The similarity lies in the fact that the postcolonial scholar must work with
received metaphors, which are European in their historical constitution.
But, as Spivak argues, the concept-metaphors of Enlightenment are not to be
refused as European, but to be reclaimed as ones own, realizing nothing
can be either fully European or fully non-European in this present that
is given, a time which is also irrecoverably postcolonial. The feminist, likewise, must try to fix a time that is of the man, and yet, she is to work within
the limiting conditions of this present time, claiming that its pieces cannot be
fully intended by the patriarchy. The crucial question remains, how to put
to work those supplements of the structure of intentionality which do not fall
within the authority of the intending (male) subject.
cussed example of a young womans suicide in colonial Bengal inserted at the end of Can
the Subaltern Speak? (cf. Spivak 1999).
173
the postcolonial text as well, this time as the foreclosed figure of the subaltern
woman. The subaltern woman is therefore twice effaced.
This insistence in staying with the work of deconstruction, even at the cost
of undoing her own disciplinary-political location, positions Spivak not merely outside the average paradigm of postcolonial fabric, but also configures a
deconstruction which is more open to re-thinking reading as practice.
Likewise, Spivaks deconstruction of the figure of the postcolonial feminist
interrogates the distance that remains between her subjectivity and the figurations of those Other women whom she represents, where this distance must be
kept in view to keep the ever-incompleteness of a feminist justice alive.
This justice is incalculable, but must be approached through calculations
which take into account the everydayness of phenomenal bodies, lives, and
experiences. Incalculability also defines the figure of the native informant as
woman, who cannot be named without reducing her alterity, and yet, she must
be named if she is to be made fit for legal rights and therefore subject of law.
Spivak only emphasizes that in this inevitable construal of feminist subjectivity as a stasis, one cannot afford to forget that the name is also a place,
which one needs ultimately to dis-place.
But intentionality, essence, or placement is not to be written off altogether, since that would make politics impossible, if one proposes that the
political needs at least a minute foothold of intentionality and subjectivity.
Spivaks work interrogates this double-bind, which places feminist ethics
between intentionality and its deconstructing supplement, intentionalitys fold
unto itself. How to put that lingering surplus to work, which is both of the
intention and yet beyond it and undoes it? If intentionality desiring full selfpresence is structurally of the man, then what is that excess which never
lets it achieve that fullness? These are the critical questions that the Spivakian
corpus raises.
The mapping of a postcolonial feminism in alliance with deconstruction is
therefore not a wholesale rejection of that Enlightenment textuality which
puts reason at its center. When one displaces the European man from the
center of such a text, one does not simply throw the text away, but learns from
its limitations. A specific moment of reason too sure of itself and invested in a
geographically positioned male subject is deconstructed, but this deconstruction itself depends on the assumption that reason as such cannot be ignored
altogether in thinking politics or textual productions. Spivak argues for a
reason more attentive to its own incomplete nature before the eruption of
specific gendered moments, and more critical of the power structures that set
it to work. This also calls for a notion of feminist justice which is transnational and yet does not reduce singularities of gendered events in its haste to act.
Spivaks arguments, I contend, have the possibility of re-articulating even the
constitution of being human, and therefore human rights, in terms of a feminism of the singular, an effort which undoes the weave of Enlightenment, but
174
Sourav Kargupta
follows its inscriptions intimately. Can this be a starting point of an impossible feminist politics based on law-like calculations and yet pointing
beyond, toward a feminist justice? I must leave these questions in suspense
within the limits of the present piece.
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Jorma Heier
Within liberal conceptions of justice, to do nothing in the face of harm-doing,
to not right wrongs is to commit a further wrong (Gosepath 2004, Pogge
2005, Rawls 1999). This is due to the prescriptive character of the judgment
unjust. The verdict that a practice or action is unjust entails recognizing that
it is principally human-made and therefore can be remedied, and that someone has the responsibility of righting these wrongs. Curiously enough, even as
there are few harms in Euro_American1 history as massive as colonialism,
attempts at righting these wrongs, even in the feeble forms of symbolic
recognition, have been woefully inadequate (Spivak 2004).
Colonial exploitation, violence, and domination are injustices that span
across a multitude of political entities, people, and centuries. In my view, a
postcolonial feminist account of justice that seeks to right historical wrongs
needs to be transnational in two ways: Firstly, it needs to move beyond a
territorialized understanding of justice that limits the commitment to justice
within the nation-state. Secondly, it must be able to think beyond the nation in
terms of shared political institutions as the outcome of shared responsibilities,
rather than its precondition. Such an account must also consider that at the
outset of the colonial project, many European political entities were still in
the process of nation-building. The responsibility to right colonial wrongs
cannot, therefore, be framed as a question of successor regimes on the level of
nation-states alone. Likewise, insofar as colonialism has been an intergenerational project, it makes no sense to assign responsibility to individuals. Rather, any theory of transnational justice must address the structural conditions
that form the basis and background of colonial harms, for they do not cease
when individual harm-doers decease. Like any approach centered around a
key norm, a postcolonial feminist account of transnational justice must be
mindful of the twofold character of justice: Many of the harms that constitute
1
I use the understrike character (_) to bring into relief two ideas: Dipesh Chakrabartys
suggestion that Europe and America be understood as hyperreal terms [] that [] refer
to certain figures of imagination whose geographical referents remain somewhat indeterminate (Chakrabarty 2000: 27); and the erstwhile marginality of Europe, a formerly peripheral region on the outskirts of the Asian landmass, at the far edge of the trade routes, remote
from the great civilizations of Islam and the East which was able in a century or two to
achieve global and economic dominance (Mills 1999: 33). This history undercuts the claim
to European-American exceptionalism. Thirdly, the understrike character indicates the contributions to world history by the colonized that the colonial gaze has written out of history.
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neocolonialism have been, and still are, legitimized in the name of disseminating justice and doing good in the world (Dhawan 2011). An analysis of
processes of justice must therefore consider the simultaneous enabling and
disempowering function of norms like justice (ibid: 266) by asking who is
counted as the subjects of justice, and who is constructed as justices Other.2
Onora ONeill (1991) argues that none of the dominant conceptions of
justice communitarianism, consequentialism, rights-based accounts, Kantian
universal obligations, and libertarianism provide an adequate framework for
conceptualizing transnational justice.
According to ONeill, the communitarianism concept of justice is when
the authority of any [discourse on justice, J. H.] is anchored within a specific
tradition or community (1991: 280). But this leads to the problematic assumption that the largest sphere of justice is the political community. Since
concepts of justice are not universally shared, the application of international
justice is illusory (ibid: 281). Consequentialism sees injustice in the global
distribution of resources. Just acts are those that maximize global [] wellbeing (ibid: 283). But since it is impossible to foresee all options and causes
on a global scale, and thus determine the action generating maximum justice,
consequentialism is a non-starter (ibid). Moreover, maximizing global wellbeing may mean using some lives to produce benefits for others (ibid: 284),
which permits global injustice to continue. Rights-based accounts conceive
justice as an assignable, [] claimable [] and enforceable right, which
only the claimant can waive (ibid: 288). Bearers of rights are active demanders and not passive receivers of charity. But rights also make demands on
others, which is to say, right-holders ultimately remain passive receivers.
Injustice for which there is no corresponding right remains unallocated (ibid:
285288). In the view of Kantian obligations, injustice is a matter of adopting fundamental principles which not all can adopt (ibid: 297). By contrast,
justice is a matter of not basing actions, lives or institutions on principles
that cannot be universally shared (ibid). According to ONeill, the problem
with this approach is that it does not yield algorithms either for identifying
principles of justice, or for their implementation (ibid: 304). For libertarianism, all interferences with individuals movement, work and trade [is unjust
as it] violates liberty (ibid: 290). But as the central tenet of libertarian justice
is do not redistribute (ibid: 298), not being allowed to redistribute is an
issue given the current colonial violations of economic rights (ibid: 291). In
examining the implicit boundaries of justice underlying these conceptions,
ONeill identifies a failure to consider three prerequisites: the plurality of
actors, shared habitation of one world and the mutual vulnerability of actors
(ONeill 1993: 15, translation J. H.).
2
179
Instead of letting the story of transnational justice end with these disheartening findings, I suggest a shift of emphasis, in which the focus on theoretical
approaches to transnational justice is moved to existent legal and political
practices of justice already operating across nation-state borders. The set of
practices I have in mind is known as transitional justice, which in the last two
decades has led to a significant rise in transnational practices of justice. This
contradicts ONeills claims. Transitional justice approaches seek to promote
transition from totalitarian regimes or divided political entities to more just,
democratic, and peaceful societies. Supported by institutions that operate
transnationally such as the International Criminal Court, the United Nations
Security Council, and the European Court of Human Rights, transitional justice mechanisms have done much to aid people and countries as they come to
terms with past genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, or crimes of
aggression.
Given that nearly seventy post_colonial3 countries are signatories of the
Rome Statute the central treaty enabling transitional justice and given that
genocide, crimes against humanity, and crimes of aggression are integral parts
of colonialism, European states should be brought to trial before the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity.4 But the reality is
quite different: the ICC attends to cases of violation committed by instead
of forced upon post_colonial nations. For instance, in Uganda, East Timor,
and the Democratic Republic of Congo the ICC has heard charges of sexual
slavery, inhumane acts, willful killings, pillaging, attacks against civilian
populations, destruction of property, rape, murder, and occupation. This list
of crimes committed by agents from the post_colonies resembles the very acts
committed by colonial agents during colonization.5
3
Here the understrike (_) is meant to denote the difference between former colonies such
as South Africa, which have formally been given independence, and colonies such as Australia, which have never even been formally made independent.
Of course, the Rome Statute states that no crime can be brought to trial that was committed
before its ratification, in 2002. In a later section, I will argue that omitting the era of colonialism from the jurisdiction of transitional justice is itself a symptom of the biased moral
baseline that allows the injustices of colonialism to go unremedied.
As these instances show, the violent conflicts for which the ICC seeks to dispense justice
are colonial legacies. Uganda, East Timor, and the Democratic Republic of Congo have in
common that the colonizers broke up the local structures that defined and organized political space and arbitrarily redrew the political boundaries, forcing different political entities
into single territories. In Uganda and the DR Congo, colonial rule politically favored members of one colonized group of the established nation-state over another. After the formal
decolonization, armed groups organized along ethnic lines (DR Congo), former kingdoms
(Uganda), or Christian-syncretism (Lords Resistance Army in Uganda) and began a civil
war (DR Congo), respectively secession war (Uganda), against the post_colonial government. In East Timor, the Indonesian National Army and pro-Indonesian Timorese militias
formed an armed resistance campaign against East Timors independence. The conflicts in
east Timor and DR Congo must be read in the context of Cold War proxy wars in the
post_colonies, as the Indonesian government, supported by the Western axis, sought to de-
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181
post_colonies are considered to be an outcome of cultural or ethnic idiosyncrasies, which erases the Euro-America contribution to the emergence of the
conflict. This view is shared by agents of transitional justice and reflected in
the proceedings of the ICC. The transitional justice needed in these former
colonies affirms their status as justices Other, incapable of establishing just
conditions on their own, dependent on Euro_America to make things right.
Spivak explains that the discontinuity between dispensers and receivers entails a kind of social Darwinism the fittest must shoulder the burden of
righting the wrongs of the unfit and the possibility of an alibi [for imperialistic intervention, J. H.] (Spivak 2004: 524). What at first seems to be progressive politics of recognizing plurality reinstates the racist and imperialistic
notion of the white mans burden, which seeks to correct the perceived
shortcomings in post_colonial countries by reinforcing Enlightenment standards of civilization. For all the emphasis on plurality, this approach ignores
the underlying divides between North and South, between civilized bringers
of justice and uncivilized receivers of justice, and with them the attendant
epistemic violence that constitutes the colonized subject as justices Other. I
will return to the issue of epistemic violence in the third section of my essay
(cf. Narayan 1955: 136). In my view, a post_colonial feminist account of
transnational justice must understand notions of plurality and differences as
contested, and examine who holds the power to define these differences and
their practical implications.
The second of ONeills prerequisites is shared habitation of the same
world. In Inclusion and Democracy, Iris Marion Young rightly argues that
responsibility for justice cannot be limited to nation-states because a) nationstates arbitrarily exclude some people from making justice claims; b) resources are unevenly distributed across the globe; and c) environmental issues
and economic relations do not stop at nation-state borders. In this sense, of
course, the idea of a shared habitation is a useful representation of global
circumstances. Yet, questions of justice between colonizing and colonized
political entities are infrequently formulated in this language. As Spivak observes, a process of worlding (Spivak 1985: 235) generates the naturalizing,
imperialist notions of the First World and the Third World. The inhabitants of the First World understand themselves as exempt from responsibility for injustice that resulted from colonialism. Moreover, justice is not a
property distributed evenly across a shared world. As the black folk aphorism
says, When white people say Justice, they mean Just us (Mills 1999).
Injustice is not a temporary aberrance, but the result of a flawed and biased
moral status quo (cf. Walker 2010). Through structures of power and dominance, some groups of people are excluded from a shared world of justice.
Hence, a post_colonial feminist account of transnational justice must be
mindful of what is actually shared, and how access to the agency of
post_colonial subjects is restricted.
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183
The social connection model of responsibility says that individuals bear responsibility for
structural injustice because they contribute by their actions to the processes that produce
unjust outcomes. Our responsibility derives from belonging together with others in a system of interdependent processes of cooperation and competition through which we seek
benefits and aim to realize projects (Young 2011: 105).
Like ONeill, Young argues that actors enter into practical obligations of
justice to all persons from whose actions they benefit. Insofar as ones actions
depend in part on the actions of others, one needs a generalized understanding
of what others are going to do a common framework of the practices and
institutions that both enable and limit our actions. In a world characterized by
globalized markets, interdependent states, and rapid and dense communication (Young 2006: 106), the range of actors that influence the conduct of
ones actions is often global in scope. This is especially true in the case of
sweatshop production. But the very structure of the global apparel industry
diffuses the responsibility for working conditions in sweatshops. Here,
awareness of the social connections alone does not suffice for the enormity of
the transnational task: holding garment subcontractors, managers, and multinational companies responsible. Enlisting consumers and workers around the
world in the fight against exploitative practices is imperative, but as Young
rightly argues, one needs to judge the circumstances that inform these relationships and interactions (ibid: 120). The social connection model seeks to
bring [] into question precisely the background conditions that ascriptions of blame or
fault assume as normal. When we judge that structural injustice exists, we mean that at
least some of the normal and accepted background conditions of action are not morally
acceptable (Young 2006: 120).
Drawing on Edward Said, Irish Studies have highlighted that intra-European colonialism
was not considered a wrong on all accounts. My inversion of the argument is thus not as
uniform as the statement might imply. Scholars such as Terry Eagleton (1988) and David
Lloyd (1993) have suggested understanding the Irish-British history as one of British expansion colonialism.
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standing the colonizers acknowledged (cf. ONeill 1991: 277). Here lies a
central challenge to the post_colonial feminist account of transnational justice: the privileged are protected by the biased moral baseline that excludes
the colonized from protection.
Judgment of the background conditions can help to understand injustice as
the consequence of an unjust status quo rather than of a temporary departure
from an otherwise just set of global structures and moral standards. Yet, as
Uma Narayan observes, attending to social connections alone does not guarantee that the relationships are non-hegemonic. When colonizers and colonized shared a relationship, they had very different accounts of what the
relationship and its interdependencies amounted to, and whether they were
morally justified (Narayan 1995: 136). Structural relationships between
powerful and powerless groups are grounded on ideologies that perpetuate the
hierarchy, which is why post_colonial feminist accounts of justice need to
address the ideological functions served by moral theories (ibid: 136).
Because Young does not frame the sweatshop example as a colonial harm,
Youngs considerations neglect the epistemic dimension of structural injustice, or what Charles W. Mills calls epistemic ignorance (1999), and the
role that ideology plays therein. Although Young notes that the dominant
frameworks of justice usually do not think it obligatory or even fair to ask of
people to change their normal habits and practices or sacrifice a great deal of
what reasonable people regard as their normal self-interest for the sake of
furthering justice (2011: 123124), Youngs social-connection model does
not provide the conceptual tools necessary to challenge the normal habits,
the normal interests and the epistemic ignorance that allows for privileged
irresponsibility (Tronto 1993: 121). Nor does it grapple with the ambivalent
character of responsibility in a post_colonial context. As Narayan stresses:
the white mans burden [] included both a sense of obligation to confer the benefits of
western civilization on the colonized, and a sense of being burdened with the responsibility
for doing so (Narayan 1995: 135).
185
which the privileged can ignore the harm their normal interests cause to the
colonized. How does this epistemic ignorance operate?
In Joan Trontos analysis, part of being privileged means having the opportunity simply to ignore certain forms of hardship that they do not face
(Tronto 1993: 120121). People in the global North who claim they do not
know that their actions, or the actions of their governments, and of their globally operating corporations contribute to the structural vulnerabilities of the
disadvantaged use this privileged ignorance for the privileges of ignorance.
Aside from conferring political, social, and economic benefits, this ignorance
shields the privileged from the demands that the less privileged be treated
justly. On the one hand, it absents colonizers from the responsibility-setting
process; on the other, it prevents the colonized from demanding that colonizers take responsibility for righting the injustices of colonialism (cf. Tronto
2013: 63).
Millss study of the epistemic preconditions of what Mills calls the racial
contract shows that privileged ignorance runs deeper than the inability to see
harm one has no direct connection to. The racial contract is an
agreement to misinterpret the world [] Thus in effect [] the Racial Contract prescribes
for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance [] producing
the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they
themselves have made. Part of what it means to be constructed as white [] part of what
it requires to achieve Whiteness, successfully [] is a cognitive model that precludes selftransparency and genuine understanding of social realities (Mills 1997: 18, italics in original).
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Though Narayan has argued against the idea that the oppressed ought to
speak for themselves, several critics have questioned Narayans assumption
that the oppressed have privileged epistemic insight into their own situations.
Spivak dismisses the claim that the subject of oppression can revert to a pure
form of self-consciousness (1988: 285) that has not been informed by colonial
discourses and epistemic violence (ibid: 281). Similarly, Mills points to the
element of coercive ideological conditioning (1999: 83) that enables the
colonial project in the first place. The signatories of the racial contract use
physical and epistemic violence to make the objects of the contract into the
nonwhite subpersons it specifies (ibid: 87). This creates a dehumanizing
and depersonizing conceptual apparatus (ibid) through which both the colonizers and the colonized must learn to read and misinterpret colonial subjects. Spivak believes that every act of representation conflates speaking for
and speaking about. For Vanessa Andreotti, the claim that the subaltern
cannot speak
means that she cannot speak in a way that would carry authority or meaning for nonsubalterns without altering the relations of power/knowledge that constitutes the subaltern
in the first place (2007: 71).
187
As Ilan Kapoor observes, to unlearn privilege one must retrace the history and itinerary of
ones prejudices and learned habits (from racism, sexism and classism to academic elitism
and ethnocentrism) (Kapoor 2004: 41). This retracing can be undertaken by the privileged
individuals and groups without expecting the oppressed to assume the burden of educating
the oppressors.
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practices (Young 2011: 4748). From this, Young infers that the promotion
of justice requires institutions and collective action, which in turn necessitates
collective organization and institutional support (ibid: 69). But which institution should guarantee transnational justice? A transnational civil society or a
transnational framework of law enforced by nation-states?
189
For a discussion of statelessness within the nation-state, see Judith Butler and Spivak
(2007).
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inclusion in general: post_colonies admitted to deliberations within the Euro_American world-order must accept existing rules and conditions before
admission, enormously restricting their ability to set their own terms. Besides,
changing the hegemonic epistemologies under which transnational juridical
institutions operate is an even taller order than changing the epistemologies
under which individual actors operate, as the underlying statutes, constitutions, and contracts are protected against revision. Unless judicial agents
understand the necessity to learn to learn from below, judicial proceedings
will fail to be a promising alternative to transnational civil society all the
more so because state, law, and civil society structure their actions according
to the same faulty moral baseline that permits the injustices of colonialism to
remain ignored. To disprove the saying When white people say justice they
mean just us, the privileged need to shed both epistemic ignorance and
irresponsibility and assume responsibility for transnational injustice.
Conclusion
I began this essay by noting the asymmetry in existing practices of transnational justice: post_colonial subjects are excluded from the purview of justice
even as post_colonies are deemed notorious receivers of justice, incapable
of righting wrongs themselves. I then identified two elements that generate
this harmful state of affairs: privileged irresponsibility and epistemic ignorance. In drawing on works by Young and Tronto, I sketched an account of
transnational justice that argued that individual actors have a responsibility to
pursue transnational justice by virtue of the actions and structural processes
that connect them. I also described how epistemic ignorance can obfuscate
entangled histories and transnational relationships and pointed to Narayans
idea of methodological humility and Spivaks notion of learning to learn
from below as two corrective options. After removing the theoretical obstacles to conceptualizing transnational justice, I considered which institution
should be entrusted with guaranteeing transnational justice. The reference to
Jonathan Swifts A Modest Proposal10 in my title alludes ironically to the
challenging nature of transnational justice: under the current political conditions people are more likely not to meet their responsibilities than fulfill them.
But the main aim of this essay has been to defend the claim that the entangled
and inextricably intertwined relationships that give rise to colonialisms
harms can also provide a sufficient basis for a just and responsible approach
to rectifying those harms. As I noted at the beginning, to do nothing in the
10
In his 1729 satire A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift purports to solve the famine in Ireland by suggesting that Irish parents eat their children or sell them as food to the wealthy.
191
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We are using the term subaltern in accordance with its theoretical elaboration by Antonio
Gramsci, Gayatri Spivak, and the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group.
We are using the term supplement in a Derridean sense as something added to a supposed
original, which functions as both a displacement and substitution of that which it supplements (see Derrida 1997: 141157).
196
We propose to treat liberal theories of global justice as an enabling violation (Spivak 1996: 29) in the Spivakian sense and thus as something which
we cannot not want (Spivak 1999: 84), but which operates through violent
exclusions and elisions.
197
Even within the confines of a liberal nation-state of the Western idealtypical model, Rawls hypothetical contract device is based on a number of
assumptions which disregard the most disadvantaged members of such a
society. His model, for example, fails to reflect on injustices resulting from
gender, race, sexual orientation, disability, and their intersections. Nussbaum
(2002: 134135) argues that excluding issues of disability from the design of
societys basic structures is a serious flaw in Rawlss arguments, as such
issues cannot be postponed until after social structures have already been
designed. Nussbaum criticizes that Rawlss Kantian conception of the person
[] based on rationality leads him to conclude that people who lack the
capacity to enter into contracts are not owed any duties of political justice
(2011: 87). Nussbaums criticism is important, but remains within a similarly
narrow liberal framing. She only points to the problems involved in Rawlss
focus on rationality as regards the treatment of disability, but not as regards
the very construction of the category of the rational through its (for example,
colonial or female) Other. She considers the thought experiment of the
original position to be extremely valuable, since it is based on rational subjects choosing appropriate principles of justice for society under complete
disregard of their own race, class, gender, and socio-economic position. She
argues that it is significant that the parties to the original position choose the
principles governing societal cooperation on the basis of their mutual advantage, rather than a concern for others (ibid: 86).
Nussbaums argumentation is based on a narrow instrumental understanding of interests and on the model of a sovereign individualist subject, which
she shares with Rawls. However, she points out contra Rawls that due to
the assumptions of rough equality and mutual advantage [Rawls's theory] cannot deal well
with cases in which we find a deep asymmetry of power between the parties that is not
easily corrected by simply rearranging income and wealth (2010: 8687).
However, like Rawls she fails to reflect on wider historical and structural
geopolitical and geo-economic asymmetries of power.
The even more problematic consequences of such assumptions within a
theory of justice on a global scale become apparent in Rawlss later works.
The Law of Peoples (2000) centrally focuses on issues of international justice
and seeks to define principles regulating relations among different societies.
This emphasis on societies indicates a changed focus of analysis in his later
work. Whereas A Theory of Justice treats individuals/citizens as primary
agents of social cooperation and as the principal units of analysis, The Law of
Peoples primarily focuses on societies, or in Rawlss terminology, peoples.
Rawls concentrates on peoples instead of states in order to exclude considerations of national sovereignty. However, this disregards the complexities of
current geopolitical structures in which (especially powerful) states, transnational organizations, and regulatory regimes have profound impacts on peoples, especially those living in states which are geopolitically weak.
198
In The Law of Peoples, Rawls bases his theory of global justice on a significantly modified original position, wherein the parties are no longer rational citizens but peoples. As a result of the analytic shift from individuals to
peoples, the principles which he proposes for international justice are very
different from the ones at the domestic level. Rawls does not envisage the
creation of a just global social structure or substantive redistribution of resources on a global scale. Instead, the ability of peoples to determine their
own internal rules free from external interference becomes central. Rawlss
theory of international justice thus imposes only limited duties to assist other
peoples. These are far below levels of social obligations envisaged at the
domestic level within the earlier original position. Additionally, his theory of
global justice is based on an explicit normative classification of different
peoples: liberal peoples, decent peoples, outlaw states, societies burdened by unfavorable conditions and benevolent absolutisms (Rawls
2000: 4). This establishes a hierarchy of peoples, in which Western-style
liberal societies occupy a privileged position. Rawlss judgment that Western
liberal peoples are normatively superior to other peoples is clearly evident in
the following quote:
I believe that the causes of the wealth of a people and the forms it takes lie in their political
culture and in the religious, philosophical, and moral traditions that support the basic
structure of their political and social institutions, as well as in the industriousness and
cooperative talents of its members, all supported by their political virtues. I would further
conjecture that there is no society anywhere in the world except for marginal cases with
resources so scarce that it could not, were it reasonably and rationally organized and governed, become well-ordered (ibid: 108).
199
peoples through their philosophies, culture, and attitudes are thus fraught with
problems. He, furthermore, posits the universality of values such as individual
freedom, the rule of law, reasonableness, rationality, respect for private property, and human rights, but treats these values as a property and product of
Western modernity, while portraying only the global South as predisposed
towards falling short of these standards. He consequently elides the long (and
far from finished) history of Western violations of these standards.
Rawlss (albeit limited) focus on distribution as the only considered remedy to injustices on a global scale is equally problematic. Like most other
contemporary accounts of global justice, he assumes social justice to be primarily an issue of distribution, to be remedied by some measure of balancing
out inequalities of wealth within and among societies, but fails to take account
of the impact of skewed geopolitical structures and highly unequal power
relations on the efficacy of such attempts. This is a point also raised by Iris
Marion Young (1990: 1533), who was one of the first philosophers to address issues of global justice in a critical way. Young claims that contemporary approaches to justice are making a mistake by restricting the meaning of
social justice to the morally proper distribution of benefits and burdens
among societys members (1990: 15). She argues that by focusing too much
on the distribution of goods, these approaches forget to pay attention to the
institutions and structures determining distributive schemes. Furthermore, the
distribution of goods such as rights and power conceals the real nature of
these goods and treats them as static factors, although they are a function of
social relations and processes (ibid: 16). Social justice is thus not only about
what and how much is distributed, but also how things to be distributed
come into existence and who decides about a scheme of distribution (Forst
2007: 261). Youngs critique of the distributive paradigm raises two points
relevant to our discussion on global justice: Firstly, global poverty cannot
be explained solely in terms of distribution. Schemes against global poverty
which focus exclusively on symptoms produced by highly unequal geopolitical and geo-economic structures are therefore inadequate. Benevolent attempts to end global poverty by beneficiaries of these structures, for example
through sustainable development policies and redistributive schemes, are
likely to fail unless they address the underlying structural injustices generated
by global capitalism. Young (2007: 164167) illustrates this by reference to
anti-sweatshop consumer campaigns. These attempts by ethically conscious
consumers to achieve improvements in the working conditions of Third
World workers fail to overcome global structural injustices. The second relevant implication of Youngs critique of the distributive paradigm relates to
issues of participation and agency. She stresses that subjects located at the
bottom of globalized capitalist structures are systematically excluded from
decisions made by the powerful agents of global capitalism.
200
201
202
203
Despite her stated confidence that she is not simply imposing a parochial
view that happened to be our own (1995: 6), her liberal universalism often
seems deeply parochial, since it fails to reflect on its own situation in a highly
particular liberal epistemic framework. Nikita Dhawan (2009) cogently points
to the provincialism of Nussbaums cosmopolitanism that posits easy similarities between metropolitan academics situated within the global North and
gendered subaltern subjects within the global South.
This parochialism is particularly evident in Nussbaums pedagogy aimed
at educating world citizens. She argues that an education in the Humanities
can foster critical thinking, the ability to deal with global problems as a world
citizen, and a sympathetic understanding of problems faced by others (Nussbaum 2010: 7). Nonetheless, she largely makes a business case for the Humanities as fostering skills vital for modern pluralistic democracies surrounded by a powerful global marketplace (ibid: 52). Her uncritical attitude
towards globalized capitalism becomes particularly apparent in her claim that
education can promote both profit and good citizenship at the same time,
since a flourishing economy requires the same skills that support citizenship (ibid: 10). Nussbaums positing of a symbiotic relationship between
capitalist globalization and an education for citizenship is starkly different
from Spivaks ethico-political pedagogy aimed at undoing subalternity
through effective access to citizenship. Even though Nussbaum validates
efforts in Indian education to break away from models of education as rote
learning by getting children to understand what they [are] reading (ibid:
63) and to treat children as active and critical participant[s] in education
(ibid: 57), her prescriptions for a critical pedagogy are severely hampered by
her lack of appreciation of structures of neocolonial exploitation and class
apartheid (Spivak 2004: 536). In contrast, Spivak centrally focuses on and
seeks to break down such structures within her pedagogy aimed at transna-
204
205
206
207
Bibliography
Derrida, Jacques (1997): Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Dhawan, Nikita (2007): Can the Subaltern Speak German? And Other Risky Questions: Migrant Hybridism versus Subalternity, accessed 12 December 2012,
http://translate.eipcp.net/strands/03/dhawan-strands01en#redir.
Dhawan, Nikita (2009): Zwischen Empire and Empower: Dekolonisierung und Demokratisierung. In: Femina Politica 2, 2009, pp. 5263.
Forst, Rainer (2007): Radical Justice: On Iris Marion Youngs Critique of the Distributive Paradigm. In: Constellations 14, 2, pp. 260265.
Loomba, Ania (2008): Colonialism/Postcolonialism. New York: Routledge.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (2003): Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory,
Practicing Solidarity. Durham/London: Duke University Press.
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Nussbaum, Martha/Glover, Jonathan (eds.) (1995): Women, Culture and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Nussbaum, Martha (1998): Public Philosophy and International Feminism. In: Ethics
108, pp. 762796.
Nussbaum, Martha (2002): Capabilities and Social Justice. In: International Studies
Review 4, 2, pp. 123135.
Nussbaum, Martha (2003): Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social
Justice. In: Feminist Economics 9, 23, pp. 3359.
Nussbaum, Martha (2010): Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities.
Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Nussbaum, Martha (2011): Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press.
Rawls, John (1971): A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Rawls, John (2000): The Law of Peoples. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988): Can the Subaltern Speak? In: Nelson,
Cary/Grossberg, Lawrence (eds.): Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture.
London: Macmillan.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1990): The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies,
Dialogues, (ed.) Harasym, Sarah. New York: Routledge.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1996): The Spivak Reader, ed. Landry, Donna/Maclean,
Gerald. New York/London: Routledge.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1999): A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a
History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2004): Righting Wrongs. In: The South Atlantic Quarterly, 103, 2/3, pp. 523581.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2005): Use and Abuse of Human Rights. In: Boundary 2 32, 1, pp. 131189.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2006): In Other Worlds. New York: Routledge.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2008): Other Asias. Malden/Oxford: Blackwell.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2012): An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press.
Young, Iris Marion (1990): Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Young, Iris Marion (2007): Global Challenges: War, Self-determination and Responsibility for Justice. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Julia Surez-Krabbe
Introduction
One of the most serious critiques against human rights politics is that its primary point of reference is white male subjectivity based on a normative construction of the category human. This essay explores the intimate relationship between race, gender, and the definition of what it means to be human
during the conquest and colonization of the Americas, and suggests that we
revise our historiological and legal assumptions about human rights. The
classification human emerged out of the discourses of the Spanish colonizers during the 16th century. To understand how this designation problematizes twentieth(and twenty-first)-century human rights, the following discussion
translates the coordinates of our analysis from the space of Europe to the
Americas and from the time of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(ratified by the United Nations in 1948) to the late fifteenth (post-1492) and
sixteenth-century discovery of the Americas.
This analytical shift, a shift in the geography of reason, provides a vital
framework for examining the history of human rights from the Other side.
The rights narrative commonly refers back to the English Bill of Rights in
1689, the US Declaration of Independence in 1776, and the Declaration of
the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1788 in the context of the French
Revolution. According to this account, these declarations reached a culminating point in 1948 with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Balfour/Cadava 2004: 282, Douzinas 2000, 2007a) and a series of more recent
culminating points in connection with the history of UN peacekeeping and the
recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These wars are referred to in the third
section of this paper, where the notion of a just war is examined.
In contrast to mainstream accounts of rights and race, the understanding
expressed here proceeds beyond the scientific racism that emerged during
the nineteenth century and classified humans biologically. Such determinism
was a radicalization of the hierarchization of humans that emerged shortly
after the 1492 discovery of America (cf., for instance, Csaire 2006, Quijano 1992, 2000a, 2000b). The fault line in human rights politics namely its
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normative formulation of what it means to be human1 needs to be considered in relation to the historical connection linking human rights to race and
to gender. This tie emerged out of the period of the first modernity, that is,
the period of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism. During this time, the first
systematic transatlantic connection involving slavery, genocide, and the exploitation of Europes Other was also established.
The shift in the geography of reason that informs this essay involves developing concepts beyond mainstream definitions of human rights. Boaventura de Sousa Santos nuanced understanding of the different processes of globalization is useful for addressing the other side of human rights; human rights
can be globalized localisms, localized globalisms (reinforcing relations of
power), as well as a common inheritance of humanity (contesting power
relations) (2002a: 2529). In addition, Frantz Fanons distinction between
2
the zone of being and the zone of nonbeing (Fanon 1967: 10) is relevant
to this analysis; namely, the distinction between those whose existence accords with prevalent norms and those who are constructed and assessed
against those norms. In the zone of being, human rights provide legality and
protection. However, in the zone of nonbeing, rights require victims and are,
more often than not, articulated around the logic of appropriation, exploita3
tion, and violence (cf. Santos 2007: 1, Surez-Krabbe 2011). Simultaneously, the zone of nonbeing contains the possibility of treating human rights as
the common inheritance of humanity by virtue of other grammars of human
dignity4 that occur among subjects in this zone.
This essay explores the limits of human rights with reference to the critiques of de Sousa Santos and Fanon. It also examines historical and current
normative constructions of the category human. The following section
addresses presumptions of sovereignty from the subjective stance of the conquistadors and their heirs. The de facto lack of access to the emancipatory
and enabling aspects of human rights is an outcome of that subjective stance
and a major concern for social movements and progressive political organizations involved in enacting human rights. It is at the point where human rights
collapse that the struggles for human rights become most relevant. In order to
grasp contemporary human rights politics, we therefore need to apprehend the
reasons behind this failure (Baxi 2002).
1
2
3
4
This essay refers to human as a category, among other things, to emphasize the ways in
which the term is used to hierarchize people.
See Fanon 1967 and Gordon 1995, 2004, 2009 for more on the zone of nonbeing.
See Santos conceptual image of the abyssal line in 2007: 1.
The research project ALICE, Strange Mirrors, Unsuspected Lessons (2012-2015), operates
with this terminology. See the project webpage at: http://alice.ces.uc.pt/en/index.php/thema
tic-areas/human-rights-and-other-grammars-of-human-dignity/?lang=en.
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the context of the discovery of America (including the Caribbean) from the
sixteenth century onwards. The I conquer is the first modern subjectivity. It
is a way of being that seeks to erase the Other through exploitation and violence. It is an incarnation of the conqueror, who arrived and practiced diverse
forms of violence in the Americas; it represents a male, enslaving, and phallic
ego (Dussel 1992, 2008). The first modern subjectivity is thus also a deeply
gendered subjectivity (Dussel 1992, Lugones 2007, Maldonado-Torres 2008).
While Dussels conceptualization of the I conquer elaborates some of the
ideas already being explored within the Latin American philosophical tradition, it is especially by virtue of Nelson Maldonado-Torres and Maria Lugones analyses that this essay explores the links between the colonial/modern
subjectivity, race, gender, and human rights.
In any examination of human rights, acknowledging the colonial origins of
modern subjectivity is crucial; this reveals an oversight in human rights
scholarship that many human rights proponents and critics alike overlook. To
refer to one example, Costas Douzinas' seminal Human Rights and Empire:
The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (2007b) demonstrates this
blindness to the concept human within human rights and within the practices of humanitarianism, even though his approach is otherwise persuasive.
Early in Human Rights and Empire (2007b: 12), he provides a brief account
of the genealogy of the idea of the human being that stays within the geographical confines of Europe (Ancient Greece and Rome being the epicenters
of the narrative) and consequently collapses historical time to these places. As
such, Douzinas narrative neglects the events taking place during the first
modernity and the actors involved in these events. In addition, he does not
consider how race and gender inform the emergence of the category human effectively, disregarding coloniality. This means that, although interesting, his analysis and arguments are flawed as his critique moves within the
same Eurocentric framework as the ideas he examines.
By contrast, this essay establishes that the construction of man or the
human emerged in the context of the discovery of America. Several scholars have shown that this construction had already been established during the
sixteenth century, as can be seen in the context of the debates among the
Spanish colonial powers concerning the humanity of the Indians. These debates, best known as the Valladolid debates, were conducted by representatives of two conflicting perspectives. According to the viewpoint represented
by Gins de Seplveda, who framed his argument in secularized terms (cf.
Seplveda 1996 [approximately 1550]: 109113), the indigenous peoples
were subhuman Others who had to comply with more advanced peoples and
their laws. If war was necessary to meet these aims, then war had to be
waged.
Seplvedas position provided legitimization for colonization and exploitation, including sexualized exploitation, as discussed below. Bartolom de
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In contrast to Lugones distinction between the light and the dark side (2007), I prefer Fanons more existential distinction between the zones of being and nonbeing (1967).
As such, the imperial attitude has quickly become a racist and colonial commonplace that has radicalized and naturalized the non-ethics of war (ibid:
247).
When Maldonado-Torres writes about the non-ethics of war, he does so in
order to emphasize the differences between the zone of being and the zone of
nonbeing. In the zone of being, we can discuss an ethics of war. This ethics of
war is, however, suspended in relation to those in the zone of nonbeing,
where it becomes a non-ethics that includes genocidal and epistemicidal practices towards the subjects relegated to this zone. As Maldonado-Torres elaborates, war also includes rape, and although the primary targets of this latter
practice of sexual violence are women, men of color are also regarded as
penetrable subjects (ibid: 247248).
These insights are linked to the development of human rights politics: the
imperial doubt had already been internalized within the subjectivity of the
conquerors by the time that Pope Paul III, in 1537, declared the Indians human. Hence, the Popes declaration had no significant impact (MaldonadoTorres 2007: 244, cf. Quijano 1992). Accordingly, the same doubt was already in play when the above-mentioned Valladolid debates regarding the
humanity of indigenous peoples occurred.
The imperial commonplace, the I conquer stance, was never an occasion
for interrogation by Cartesian doubt either and has been left unquestioned and
continues to lie at the heart of the dominant scientific disciplines concerned
with the study of social, economic, political, legal, and humanistic affairs.
This is not coincidental. Rather, as the last section of this discussion demonstrates, it connects historically to the processes that took place during the
transition between the first and the second modernity and so to the transition
between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, when northern European
(mostly British, Danish, Dutch, French, and German) and North American
colonialisms began to take over the transatlantic connection and slave trade
previously controlled by the powers of Spain and Portugal. The next section
examines the complex relationship between the construction of the category
human, the race-gender normativity fundamental to the imperial attitude,
and human rights.
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ards. The difficulty is, of course, that these apparently universal standards are
actually Christian Spanish standards (Anghie 1996: 332).
While Vitoria emphasizes the humanity of the indigenous peoples in some
parts of his discussion, in others he excuses just war against them. He does so
because, according to the Spanish, the Indians are potentially ontologically
equal to them. The criteria for this ontological equality, however, are formulated within Spanish Christian epistemological frameworks and the negation
of the Other, the zone of nonbeing, lies at the center of this definition. In
other words, what the Spanish regard as the indigenous peoples potential to
become like them is, at the same time, that by which they negate the humanity
of the Other: that is, a potential for sameness is also a negation of difference.
This negation makes it possible to grant meta-legal status to the war
against the Indians; the war against the Indians was justified by the universal
jus gentium, similar to the way in which contemporary wars against Iraq and
Afghanistan are justified in the name of human rights. Indeed, whereas Vitorias argument concludes by not denying the difference of the Indians, it also
uses their assumed sameness and equality to deny them sovereignty. As mentioned, it is precisely because the Indians are equal to the Spanish that they
have to obey universal norms for example, those that dictate the right to
travel and explore other lands, to trade in a fair manner, and to spread the
Christian religion in other words, the Indians have the right to colonize if
they become what they in fact can never be: Spanish (Anghie 2004: 2021,
Vitoria 1981: 7276). Vitorias humanist equality masks difference and unequal power relations with a veneer of Spanish philosophical, cultural, economic, and political life. These Spanish forms of life dictate the terms of jus
gentium, demonstrating that the imperial attitude is in operation.
The imperial attitude additionally interprets the Indians resistance to becoming like the Spanish as their inability to comply with the universal laws of
jus gentium. This allows the Spanish powers to affirm that the Indians are
violating universal laws and consequently committing a transgression that
legitimates just war against them (Anghie 1996: 326). Indeed, this is a naturalization of inferiority, and this inferiority itself becomes the rationale for a
just war (cf. Dussel 2008: 166, Maldonado-Torres 2007). By these means, the
Indians end up existing as violators of the universal law who cannot implement righteous war themselves. Just war is, by this definition, a Christians
right; therefore the indigenous peoples would have to convert to Christianity
before being able to conduct war righteously (Anghie 1996: 330). As suggested with reference to the recent Iraqi and Afghani wars, the foundations of
contemporary international law and the doctrine of sovereignty share this
ambiguity which is obscured or explicitly negated in most studies of international relations and international law (cf. Anghie 1996, 2004).
Conclusion
The imperial attitude has remained almost wholly unexamined in dominant
knowledge construction since the sixteenth century. This is connected to the
processes that took place during the transition between the first and the second modernity, when northern Europe started to take charge of the transatlantic connection and slave trade previously controlled by Spain and Portugal. In
this period of transition, the colonial elites across the Atlantic continued to
deny, or render obsolete, the social struggles of non-elites that, however, had
powerfully affected their thought and political practice. While it is outside the
scope of this discussion to consider the dynamics between emancipation and
the subsumption or neutralization of emancipation within the coloniality of
power, it is nevertheless important to underline the crucial role the Other has
played in changing the terms of ideas and legal issues, perhaps most saliently
in relation to the idea of racial equality (cf. Surez-Krabbe 2013). It is symptomatic of the imperial attitude that the impact of the social struggles of these
Others, such as the Haitian Revolution (17911804), has been largely negated
over time.
The criticisms that came to be known as the Black Legend, which was
primarily advanced during the Enlightenment, involved a representation of
Spanish colonialism as anachronistic and exceptionally brutal.6 The Black
Legend was in effect a Protestant, northern European backlash against Catholic, colonial Spain promoting the imperial interests of northern European and
North American colonialisms. By representing Spanish colonialism as particularly cruel, northern European colonial powers could differentiate themselves as being more humane and modern (Beverley 2008: 599). In effect, the
Black Legend played an important role as another stratum of denial, which
legitimized colonialism and the imperial attitude.
The initial layer of denial, as outlined above, in the discussion of I conquer and its imperial attitude is based upon the negation of the Other. The
second layer is the Cartesian ego cogito, which conceals the negation of the
Other and is built upon the I conquer. The third layer is an extension of
these negations, whereby Spain and southern Europe are themselves located
in a border zone, as they are, for example, via the Black Legend. Spain, Portugal, and the rest of southern Europe are considered neither modern nor
colonial. At best, they might be considered pre-modern due to an academic
bias towards the heritage of Ancient Greece and Rome (cf. Santos 2002b).
One of the common assumptions of northern European elites has been an
Julin Juderas coined the term in his 1914 book The Black Legend and Historical Truth in
reference to anti-Spanish propaganda. The Black refers here to the pejorative representation of Spanish colonial behaviour.
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understanding of the Other as being at an earlier stage in the history of humanity; more specifically, at an earlier stage of northern European history.
Significantly, the imaginaries reflected in the Black Legend have facilitated a denial of the transatlantic nature of Western ideas since the discovery of
the Americas. This denial is one of the reasons why many students of human
rights depart from the assumption that these are mainly a product of seventeenth and eighteenth century northern European thought, particularly linked
to Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651) and Locke (Two Treatises of Government,
1690) and additionally place the origins of human rights in the French Revolution (as outlined in the introduction to this essay). This historical narrative,
however, is an aspect of the third stratum of negations mentioned above.
To forward this essays central thesis that human rights are not only
built upon, but also protect, white male subjectivity, and that they are the fruit
of the construction of the category human that emerged as a central point of
discussions among the Spanish colonizing elites during the sixteenth century it is pivotal to understand the three layers of negation briefly outlined
above. The race-gender power relations embedded in the category human
played a significant role in the context of the social struggles of racialized
subjects in Latin America during independence and republic-building. Among
the effects of these struggles was the inclusion of the idea of racial equality in
the legal frameworks of several newly independent countries.
Many years later, the idea of racial equality also came to impact on the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Glendon 2003: 33, cf. Carozza
2003). Although the idea of racial equality put the Latin American and Caribbean legal tradition at the forefront of human rights thinking, it increasingly
lost its emancipatory potential and was instead accommodated by white male
elites to protect their interests. It was indeed used to make invisible and to
neutralize the struggles of racialized subjects, who had brought the idea of
racial equality into the light in the first place. For instance, the widespread
assumption that the abolition of slavery was a white mans concession still
has currency.
The period of independence and republic-building in Latin America is
connected to the general decline of Spain as a major colonial power and the
rise of northern Europe and the US as imperial powers. While Latin American
independence movements explicitly used the idea of racial equality, the elites
in Europe and the United States largely ignored racial issues. As the French
revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen attest, the
concerns for racial equality had been absent in these latitudes for some time.
Contrary to debates on the rights of people in the sixteenth century, consideration about the colonial aspects of issues concerning citizenship and
(in)equality were increasingly absent from elaborations of the ideas of rights
(Mignolo 2000: 29).
Bibliography
Anghie, Anthony (1996): Francisco de Vitoria and the Colonial Origins of International Law. In: Social and Legal Studies 5, pp. 321336.
Anghie, Anthony (1999): Finding the Peripheries: Sovereignty and Colonialism in
Nineteenth-Century International Law. In: Harvard International Law Journal 40,
1, pp. 171.
Anghie, Anthony (2004): Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International
Law. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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Spivak, Gayatri Chakraborty (1993): Can the Subaltern Speak? In: Williams, Patrick/
Chrisman, Laura (eds.): Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader.
Hemel Hempstead: Harvester.
Surez-Krabbe, Julia (2011): At the Pace of Cassiopeia: Being, Nonbeing, Human
Rights, and Development. PhD Thesis. Roskilde: Roskilde University/Department
of Culture and Identity.
Surez-Krabbe, Julia (2013): Race, Social Struggles, and Human Rights: Contributions from the Global South. In: Journal of Critical Globalization Studies 6,
pp. 78102.
Vitoria, Francisco de (1981) [1539]: Relecciones Sobre los Indios. Bogot: El Bho.
Wynter, Sylvia (2003): Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom
Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation: An Argument. In: New
Centennial Review 3, 3, pp. 257337.
Judith Schacherreiter
Introduction
One of the main critiques of human rights touches on their ethnocentricity:
although human rights are widely held to be universally applicable, their
justification is primarily framed in Western terms (cf., for example, Griffin
2011: 137). Against this background, I will demonstrate that with regard to
property rights the problem runs much deeper. There are additional troubling
dimensions to ethnocentricity and universalism which go beyond the mere
fact of human rights being embedded in Western concepts.
Discourses of Natural Law and the legal philosophy of the Enlightenment
have justified the universalism of a Western understanding of property while
simultaneously dismissing communal land usage,1 as practiced by European
peasants in pre-capitalist Europe and by the indigenous population of the
Americas, as traditional and primitive. Drawing on postcolonial scholars
work, I will investigate the relation between the politics of property, the universalization of property, and coloniality. In this context, I will examine the
propertization of land in postcolonial Mexico and its effects on indigenous
communal land. My analysis will show that the universalization of property
contains a colonial way of thinking which is inherently biased against communal forms of land usage, a practice which is still alive in some of the formerly colonized countries.
The essay is structured as follows: I will begin by tracing the emergence
of property as a human right in Europe, which occurred in the historical context of propertization of soil and was backed by philosophical theories focusing on propertization of land. Here, I will analyze the theories of Hugo Grotius, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant as some of the
most important legal philosophers of Natural Law and Enlightenment. They
conceptualize the conversion of common land into individual property as a
1
In this essay, the notions of communal land usage and common land refer to land used
by a community in accordance with certain rules typically developed by the community itself. This land is neither subject to property rights nor to the free market.
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Judith Schacherreiter
229
Propertization in Europe
Property, Civilization and Modernity
From the outset, the call to treat the protection of property as a human right
has been dominated by capitalist interests. The historical background to this
legal conception was the abolishment of feudal agrarian structures by the
propertization of land, a process which was completed in the eighteenth and
nineteenth century (Hobsbawm 1996: 24, 31, 4849). According to Karl
Marx (1962 [1947]: 741802), the English enclosure movement, which converted feudal common land into private property, facilitated original accumulation and thereby created the basis for the capitalist mode of production. In
other European countries, the liberation of land from feudal rights, obligations, and relationships, as well as the conversion of formerly feudal land into
free and full property also significantly contributed to the transition to capitalism. The lords lost dominance over the peasants, but the peasants also lost
their feudal rights over the soil, including their communal usage rights. Rural
land and rural workforce were subjugated to the free market and thereby converted into commodities (Polanyi 2001: 37, 7478, 187, Welkoborsky 1976).
Karl Polanyi (2001: 179) argues that in Europe, the [c]ommerciali-zation of
the soil was only another name for the liquidation of feudalism.
Natural Law and Enlightenment philosophy universalized these processes
by defining private property in land as a fundamental basis for human development and civilization in general. Key philosophers like Hugo Grotius, John
Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant considered the abolition
of communal land through the implementation of individual property as an
unfortunate (in Rousseaus view) but necessary step to transcending the state
of nature and entering civilization. According to their theories of property,
property in land is initially established through the occupation of terra nullius, namely no mans land. This process is called originary acquisition.
The acquisition of property by occupation of something which belongs to
nobody (res nullius) was already common in Roman law. However, in Roman
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law, this concept only applied to movable things on a piece of land, in particular to wild animals, fish, and the like, not to the soil itself. In international
law, the legal institution of first occupation developed in connection with
terra nullius, but it is important to note that this term does not denominate the
acquisition of private property rights in land, but rather the establishment of
sovereignty over territory (Lesaffer 2005: 3846).
Within Natural Law and Enlightenment philosophy the notion of terra
nullius has a different connotation: the term is understood to signify land
without (individual) proprietor which is therefore open to acquisition by first
occupation. Common land is also considered terra nullius and thus can be
appropriated. By appropriation, common usage ends, and land is converted
into property. Thereby the state of nature is superseded; the propertization of
land leads to civilization (Grotius 1950: 146148, Locke 2009: 285302,
Kant 1977: 366367, 372, 374375, Rousseau 2006: 132142). Rousseau
summarizes this idea in his famous statement that
the first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, to whom it occurred to say this is
mine, and found people sufficiently simple to believe him, was the true founder of civil
society (Rousseau 2006: 132, emphasis in original).
231
(praktischer Vernunftbegriff), a pure category of reason (Denkkategorie). For both thinkers, however, the commons are only not yet property, a transitionary phenomenon without intrinsic merits. Property, on the
other hand, is understood as a natural right, since it is the endpoint of a predetermined and just (albeit unfortunate) human development (Rousseau) or
the necessary outcome of a logical process of reason (Kant).
In the context of these historical and philosophical narratives, property
was implemented as a fundamental legal concept in European positive law.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 (Ishay 1997:
138139) protected property as a natural, sacred, and inviolable human right
(Articles 2, 17). The Code Napoleon of 1804 defined ownership in Article 544 as the right to enjoy and dispose of things in the most absolute manner. The wording of both legal documents refers to property in general, but
the main aim of the legislator was to abolish feudal agrarian structures by
securing property in land. For the first time, property was applicable to movables and land alike; a highly abstract legal institution that equally embraced
such inherently different things as shoes and soil. As such, it was implemented in constitutions and civil law codifications which formed the legal basis of
capitalistic modernity. In the further development of capitalism it has increasingly been expanded to include more and more goods, material and immaterial.
Coloniality of Property
If we understand modernity as being deeply linked to coloniality, the same is
true for the modern concept of land property. The (former) colonies in the
Americas serve as the necessary Other (Dussel 1994) for the selfconstitution of European modernity and as a justification for universalist
narratives of property and civilization. Indigenous common lands are considered an anachronism and a reflection of Europes own past. Hence, their Otherness is converted into a not yet similar, which implies a not yet equal.
The common usage of land is not recognized as an autonomous legal form of
land tenancy, but reduced to a not yet property, a space without law and
cultivation. It represents the state of nature which is characterized by the
absence of law in general and property rights in particular. By universalizing
these categories law, rights, and property and determining them as necessary elements of a civilizatory evolution, Europe has created a universal,
linear path of human development.
The indigenous people of the Americas, practicing the common use of
land, are consequently defined by what they lack: there is a lack of law, a lack
of rights, a lack of property, and a lack of civilization. By setting itself against
them, Europe can define itself as advanced and civilized. This is most obvi-
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Judith Schacherreiter
ous in the philosophy of Locke. According to him, in the beginning all the
World was America (Locke 2009: 301). The wild Indian does not know
enclosure and still lives as a tenant in common (Locke 2009: 287). However, even though God gave the world to men in common, he did not want them
to remain in this state; it was His will that the industrious and rational
should cultivate the land. The industrious and rational are those who administer the terrain in accordance with utilitarian criteria on the basis of property
rights like the English colonizers. A different form of cultivation is unthinkable for Locke; common land is nothing but uncultivated land (Locke 2009:
291).
Rousseau holds a similar view, claiming that Europe constitutes the pinnacle of civilization. The indigenous people have neither reason nor philosophy but live in harmony with nature. Categories of mine and yours do not
exist, the fruits belong to all and the land to nobody. This life is regulated not
by law but by natural compassion (Rousseau 2006). The civilized man, on
the other hand, is weaker but driven by reason. In the same vein, Kant argues
that the American savages still persist in a state of nature which is a prelegal state (vorrechtlicher Zustand). Civil society (brgerliche Gesellschaft) however requires law, rights, and property, which can only appear
after the appropriation of land (Kant 1977: 365367, 372375).
Even Western Marxism has cultivated the universalist historical narrative
of a linear development from a pre-modern stage to capitalist modernity.
Accordingly, capitalism would be a necessary transitory stage in a nation's
evolution towards socialism. However, there is one important difference to
the accounts of the Enlightenment philosophers above: Marx himself refuses
the universalist notion of a necessary conversion of common land into property. When the Russian revolutionary Vera Sassulitsch asked him at the end of
the nineteenth century whether a socialist revolution would be possible in precapitalist Russia, Marx answered that his theory about the historical inevitability of capitalism was limited to Western Europe, and that due to Russia's
unique combination of circumstances, it was not necessary to destroy the rural
communities in the region. Indeed, these communities might even contribute
to a socialist transformation by serving as strongholds of collective production in a non-capitalistic society (Marx 1962a: 242243, 1962b: 384406).
Hence, Marx thought that an autonomous development of communal forms of
possession, usage, and production was possible.
However, the general European notions of the Americas as a second Europe or a New World following the Old World (OGorman 2006: 150
153, Dussel 1994: 3637) seem to rather reflect the ideas of Natural Law and
Enlightenment philosophers. This gives rise to what Antony Anghie calls the
dynamic of difference: once the gap between the civilized and the uncivilized has been established,
233
what follows is the formulation of doctrines that are designed to efface this gap: to bring
the uncivilized/aberrant/violent/backward/oppressed into the realm of civilization, the
universal order governed by (European) international law (Anghie 2006: 742).
Propertization in Mexico
Property, Modernity, and Coloniality
Mexican agrarian history is a prime example for the way in which the links
between modernity, property, and coloniality enforce colonial structures even
after formal independence. In Independent Mexico,3 the Liberals (Liberales),
under the strong influence of European liberalism and Enlightenment, implemented a modernizing program which aimed both at the elimination of colonial structures and the creation of a modern society (Hale 1965, 1985). According to Octavio Paz (2007: 269), this modernizing program operated on
the basis of a three-fold negation: a negation of the Spanish heritage, a negation of Catholicism, and a negation of the indigenous past.
A fundamental part of this program was the liberal agrarian reform. In accordance with European theories about property, the Liberals considered the
indigenous communal lands (which had survived colonialism) as an anachronism, a relic of ancient times, a manifestation of a backward culture, and an
obstacle to progress. Individual property, on the other hand, was held to be
2
3
Within Europe, the same argument was brought forward against the commoners in connection with the English enclosures (Neeson 1996: 35, 5556).
Independent Mexico (Mxico Independiente) describes the era of Mexican history between the realization of Independence (1821) and the beginning of the Mexican Revolution
(1910).
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Judith Schacherreiter
universally applicable as a natural right and a necessary part of modernization (Hale 1965: 217, Fraser 1972: 619, Montemayor 2009: 230231, 318
319). Common land was parceled, privatized, and converted into individual
property; property was implemented as a basic constitutional and civil law
concept in accordance with European legal models.4
Individual colonial titles in land were re-interpreted as titles to property
and as such protected by the constitution. The colonial distribution of land
was held to be the originary act that had constituted private property over a
piece of land for the first time (Orozco 1895: 760765).5 At the same time,
indigenous people lost their communal land in the process of privatization
and became more and more dependent on work on the huge land holdings
(so-called haciendas) of their former colonizers under conditions similar to
slavery (Silva Herzog 2007: 24, 2728, 31, Katz 2004). Thus, liberal agrarian
reform prolonged and reproduced the colonial distribution of land, wealth,
and power. Furthermore, the Liberals sustained colonial epistemic structures
by justifying their reforms with European ideas about the backwardness of
indigenous people living on the basis of communal land usage. Property and
modernization had become a new civilizing mission directed by the political
elites of Independent Mexico against indigenous and rural communities.
The Mexican Revolution (19101917) gave rise to a new agrarian law
which allowed for the redistribution of land and re-established communal
forms of possession. The main aims of the revolutionary agrarian law were
social justice and social peace. Private property was not fully eliminated, but
there was a limit on the amount of land permitted to be held by only one proprietor. Communal concepts of tenure were placed at the center of the reform;
land was assigned to rural and indigenous communities in common. If necessary, this land was taken from huge land holdings exceeding the specified
limitation. Land given to communities was declared inalienable. It could
neither be sold nor rented, and communities were obliged to cultivate the land
personally. The idea behind these regulations was that land should not be a
commodity subject to the free market, but a means of existence for the rural
population. The revolutionary concepts of communal tenancy and communities' right to land were protected by the constitution just as private property
(Gilly 2009, Ruiz Massieu 1987).6
4
Fundamental legislative provitions were Article 27 of the 1857 Mexican Constitution (Constitucin Federal de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, Sancionada y Jurada por el Congreso
General Constituyente, el da 5 de febrero de 1857) and the Law of Desamortization 1856
(Ley de Desamortizacin de Bienes de Manos Muertas de 25 de junio de 1856).
This follows from the laws on fallow land of 1863 and 1894 (Ley Sobre Ocupacin y
Enajenacin de Terrenos Baldos de 20 de julio de 1863; Ley Sobre Ocupacin y Enajenacin de Terrenos Baldos del 26 de marzo de 1894).
The main principles of the revolutionary agrarian law were laid down in the Agrarian Law
of 1915 (Ley de 6 de enero de 1915, que Declara Nulas Todas las Enajenaciones de Tierras,
Aguas y Montes Pertenecientes a los Pueblos, Otorgadas en Contravencin a lo Dispuesto
235
However, in the 1990s, when the enforcement of the revolutionary program was still pending, the Mexican government, under the influence of
NAFTA negotiations and World Bank recommendations (Heath 1990),
adopted a counter-reform of privatization and propertization (Calva 1993).7
The Mexican president promised progress and modernization. This official
political discourse was once again based on ostensibly universal concepts of
progress, development, efficiency, and modernization. It thereby reproduced
the colonial epistemic structures of Natural Law and utilitarian narratives
about property and civilization. Common land of indigenous people was
now at least implicitly deemed to be unproductive, inefficient, and inconsistent with modernization. Common land use and the ineptitude of the rural
and indigenous population, rather than lack of technologies and of public
support, were identified as the reasons for poor agrarian production.8 Privatization aimed to bring common land under the free market and to permit its
conversion into private property. The rural poor were supposed to give up
their land by means of sale and rent in favor of more efficient proprietors.
This reform once again resulted in the reproduction of colonial structures,
because the privatization of communal land allowed for new forms of dispossession of the indigenous and rural population in favor of national and transnational enterprises. Frequently, these dispossessions (which are still common
today) are legitimized by civil law contracts of sale and of usufructuary rights
entered into under circumstances of economic or political pressure, ignorance, corruption, fraud, or violence.9 Once they have sold their land, the
landless become dependent on wage labor, either on the land formerly owned
7
8
en la Ley de 25 de junio de 1856) and in Article 27 of the Constitution of 1917 (Constitucin Poltica de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos que Reforma la de 5 de febrero del 1857,
Diario Oficial Federal 5-2-1917).
With the agrarian reform of 1992, article 27 of the 1917 Constitution was fundamentally
changed and a new Agrarian Law (Ley Agraria 1992) was adopted.
This is obvious from the legislative material and the official explanations of the Mexican
government (Iniciativa de Reformas de 1992 al Artculo 27 Constitucional), reprinted in Daz de Len (2002: 918ff.).
A lot of such cases have been reported in Mexican daily newspapers; see, for example, La
Jornada 8 August 2011, p. 9: Mentiras y Traiciones, Estrategias de TrasnacionalesPpara
Obtener Ganancias; 8 August 2011, p. 8: Se Alista MineraCcanadiense a Explotar Ejidos
en Oaxaca; Temen Grave Contaminacin; 25 July 2011, p. 17: Obliga la Procuradura
Agraria a Ejidatarios a Vender sus Tierras a Empresas Particulares: Cocyp; 26 June 2009,
p. 34: Ejidatarios de Chihuahua Demandan a Minera Renegociar Precio de Tierras; 26
May 2009, p. 30: Habitantes de Tres Ejidos en Zacatecas Exigen a Minera Canadiense
Cumplir Compromisos; 24 May 2009, p. 33: Pobladores de El Monten, Nayarit, Denuncian Despojo de Playa y Represin por Defenderla; 23 April 2009, p. 36: Firman Ejidatarios de Zacatecas Acuerdo con la Minera Goldcorp; 17 March 2009, p. 31: Ejidatarios
Denuncian Hostigamiento; 9 December 2008, p. 38: Investigan Anomalas en Desistimiento de Juicio Campesino Contra Coppel en Sinaloa; 17 November 2008, p. 13: Apoyo
del Gobierno al Corredor Elico; 6 November 2008, p. 19: Buscan Sacar a Firmas Espaolas de Oaxaca.
236
Judith Schacherreiter
Thus, while the liberal agrarian reform after independence was strongly influenced by European liberalism and the allegedly universal legal principles of
property, the revolutionary agrarian law reflects the ambition to develop an
autochthonous land regime with its own legal concepts, which corresponds
better to the specific problems of Mexican rural reality. In particular, the
communal form of living of indigenous people was taken into account and
given a legal frame. With regard to its critique of European universalism and
the search for an autonomous development, Paz (2007: 293) describes the
237
Mexican Revolution as a search of ourselves (busqueda de nosotros mismos), and a rebirth of our being (revelacin de nuestro ser, ibid: 279).
Unfortunately, up to the present day, the enforcement of the revolutionary
agrarian law lags behind, and its programmatic and legal promises have yet to
be fulfilled. Following the agrarian reform of 1992, its main principles (redistribution and inalienability of communal land) have been abolished, but its
critical discourse has remained alive, still inspiring many other indigenous
and peasant movements and being placed in the international spotlight with
the Neo-Zapatista revolt of 1994.
The Neo-Zapatistas (Ejrcito Zapatista de Liberacin Nacional, EZLN)
positioned themselves within the tradition of the Mexican Revolution and of
anti-colonial struggles in general. This is reflected in the First Declaration of
the Lacandon Jungle (Primera Declaracin de la Selva Lacandona), in
which they present themselves as the product of five hundred years of
fighting (Marcos 2001: 13) and also in the Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, in which they state that their rebellion of 1994
was not born today. It spoke before with other languages and on other lands. This rebellion
against injustice spoke in many mountains and many histories. It has already spoken in
nahuatl, paipai, kiliwa, cucapa, [list of indigenous languages spoken in Mexico] (Marcos
2001: 9092).
One of their most important claims is the claim for land, which they describe
as arising from a long history of dispossession under European rule (Marcos
2001: 13). Hence, they treat the land issue not only as a social problem, but
also as a part of the postcolonial debate, demanding not only social justice but
also decolonization. Their collective land usage opposes the alleged universalism of propertization and property, and their concept of a world in which
many worlds fit (Marcos 2001: 91) may be understood as a de-universalization of occidental notions of privatization, propertization, modernization, progress, and property.
The demands of the EZLN have been laid down in the Agreements of San
Andrs, which are agreements between the Mexican government and the
EZLN (Hernndez Navarro/Vera Herrera 2004). However, these agreements
have not been fulfilled by Mexican governments, in particular not with regard
to the agrarian question. In the meantime, the EZLN has built autonomous
municipalities with independent normative systems, including their own
Revolutionary Agrarian Law (Ley Agraria Revolucionaria 1993, Monsivis/Poniatowska 2003: 4345) based on communal forms of tenure and
usage. In this context, the commons re-appear as the counter-concept of private property.
These commons should not be understood as a mere revival of the old
commons similar to those of European agrarian history or of a pre-colonial
past, but rather as an example of the currently intensively discussed concept
of the commons understood as an intellectual fundament and political phi-
238
Judith Schacherreiter
losophy (Helfrich/Heinrich-Bll-Stiftung 2012: 16) which opposes the dominance of privatization and commercialization by presenting alternative strategies for a future social order in a non-capitalistic society. These strategies go
beyond the dichotomy between market and state and are reflected in very
different projects and practices throughout the world, such as the communal
usage and administration of parks, the communal organization of public services, or the creative commons on the internet (cf., for example, Hardt/Negri
2009, Helfrich/Heinrich-Bll-Stiftung 2012). In the context of Latin America,
defending the commons against appropriation implies their defense against
neo-colonial forms of propertization.
Conclusion
The point of departure of this contribution was a critique of human rights,
which despite the claim of their universal applicability, are predominantly
justified in Western terms (Griffin 2011: 137). As argued, the issues surrounding the right to property are very complex and cannot be adequately
understood without recourse to colonial history. The root of the problem lies
in the fact that Western conceptions of property tend to represent the colonized Other as a kind of less developed Self of the West. Common land
both of the English commoners and of the indigenous people in the Americas
is considered a chronological precondition for property, but not an alternative independent concept. In this way, the concept of property is universalized, and the indigenous commons are perceived as a mere anachronism. This
is the main problem of the Enlightenment justification of property and its
newer versions in neoliberal politics. Neoliberal discourses on privatization
and propertization perpetuate the one-dimensional Enlightenment discourses
about property, civilization, and modernization as well as the colonial thinking implicit in these notions. The political enforcement of privatization and
propertization simultaneously reproduces the colonial dispossession of indigenous land. Therefore, these policies are criticizable not only in social, but
also in postcolonial terms.
James Griffin, by contrast, argues that Westerners also often adopt concepts of foreign cultures. He gives the example of Asian religious ideas,
claiming that since Western people are not troubled by the fact that these
ideas are formulated and justified solely in Asian terms, there should be nothing inherently problematic in the adoption of Western human rights in nonWestern countries (Griffin 2011: 137). However, if we consider the arguments presented in this essay, it is clear that the adoption of Asian religious
ideas in the West differs dramatically from the universal application of property laws. This essay does not take issue with the mere fact that legal concepts
239
or principles from one legal system influence other legal systems. This phenomenon, referred to as legal transplants, has taken place throughout history (Watson 1993) and is per se neither good nor bad. What is at stake in the
case of the universalization of property is rather the lack of respect for and
possibility of the survival of the Other. The Other is not recognized as an
equal in its Otherness, but instead treated as a less developed and inferior
Self. Taking away its means of existence is justified as being a necessary step
in the process of civilization or modernization. The liberal agrarian reform
after Mexican independence and the neoliberal agrarian reform of 1992 in
Mexico clearly show that the universalization of property reproduces a politics of marginalization and discrimination against the colonized Other. National political and economic elites, supported by an international legal frame
dominated by free trade and the protection of property rights, continue and
renew colonial structures against their own people.
Since its universalization through Enlightenment philosophy and liberal
politics, propertization has successively embraced more and more goods in
more and more parts of the world. Its promotion and defense have been increasingly institutionalized on an international level. This is true for very
different goods, such as land, public services, education, natural resources,
ideas, information, and knowledge. In the dominant politics of today, property is still considered as the best legal institution for the usage, organization,
production, and distribution of almost all goods and wealth worldwide.
With regard to countries of the Third World, the propertization and protection of (above all foreign) property are promoted and enforced on an international level as if it were a new civilizing mission. Like their ancestors, the
new missionaries still view alternative approaches in particular the common
usage of land and nature as mere anachronisms. What is not propertized is
considered as not yet propertized; what is not property is not yet property. Implicit in this thinking is the old colonial idea that humanity as a whole
has to follow a uniform path of development under European direction.
However, just as the universalism of property constitutes an attack on the
commons, taking the commons seriously means attacking the universalism of
property. We find counter-forces against the coloniality of property in rural
and indigenous struggles for land and natural resources. They criticize property and fight propertization not only for social reasons, but also refuse its
ostensible universalism and the ethnocentrism of its promoters. Furthermore,
they demand respect for their communal forms of tenure and usage as real
alternatives. Thereby, they also demand to be recognized as equal Others with
their own opportunities for development, their freedom to choose their future,
and their social rights. We can understand the Zapatistas' aim of a world in
which many worlds fit in this sense. The realization of this goal first and
foremost requires putting an end to the universalization of propertization,
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Judith Schacherreiter
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Chenchen Zhang
This essay examines how the human rights project1 and the project of the
European Union (EU) deal with the rights of non-citizens particularly, the
rights of undocumented migrants. In doing so, it explores the tensions between postnational articulations of EU membership, both in terms of normative expectations and institutional construction, and the post/neocolonial
condition expressed in the politics of citizenship and migration in todays
Europe. I argue that the exclusion and exploitation of postcolonial migrants
simultaneously underpins and betrays the EUs ambition to re-establish Europe as a leading normative power (Manners 2002) committed to the value
of human rights. In fact, respect for human rights is enshrined in the Treaty
of the European Union as one of the key values on which the EU is founded
and thus constitutes one of the EUs most significant accession criteria. The
connections between human rights and the EU project have gained even more
prominence since the EU was awarded the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. However,
what seems more interesting to me is the fact that the EU project and human
rights face similar criticisms.
The critiques of human-rights politics closely resemble those of the postnational interpretation of the EUropean project. Aakash Rathore and Alex
Cistelecan (2010) distinguish two approaches to problematizing the international discourse and regime of human rights: the postcolonial and the postAlthusserian approach. According to them, the former is primarily framed in
terms of difference, or of the discontinuous divide between those who right
wrongs and those who are wronged (Spivak 2004: 563); while the latter
insists on the presumption of equality, and thus a formal inscription of universality. However, taking a closer look at these claims, we may find that the two
approaches are complementary rather than contradictory. Each line of argument is effective in dealing with one aspect of the paradoxes of human
rights, which are frequently referred to in both academic discussions and
public discourses. On the one hand, humanitarian intervention is charged with
1
By project, I mean both a set of international legal documents concerning human rights as
well as their implementation through the international human rights regime comprising IOs,
NGOs, international courts, et cetera, and corresponding global narratives of emancipation
and progress (cf. Baxi 2002).
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Chenchen Zhang
being humanitarian war, and even less militant projects of human rights are
accused of imposing the ideology of the rich on the poor (Douzinas 2007:
33). On the other hand, human rights continue to be one of the most powerful
instruments employed by the oppressed and the rightless to claim equality,
rights, and justice. Being neither straightforwardly emancipatory nor unambiguously coercive, the paradoxes of human rights, as Gurminder Bhambra
and Robbie Shilliam (2009) emphasize, derive from their essentially contested nature. The instrumentalization of human rights language by hegemonic
powers is therefore no coincidental abuse, but more fundamentally rooted in
their contested nature. From a postcolonial feminist point of view, Ratna
Kapur identifies three problematic claims on which the human rights project
is grounded: a teleological narrative of progress, discriminatory universalism,
and most importantly the questionable construction of the sovereign subject of human rights (Kapur 2006). Along a similar line of critique, the arguments for the postnational nature of European citizenship and for the idea
of a cosmopolitan Europe have been interrogated for their failure to take
into account Europes history of colonial expansionism, and for their insistence on the genuinely European character of cosmopolitanism.
In light of these interrogations, this essay will, first of all, question the
problematic construction of the subject of human rights and of the citizen, by
addressing the gap between Man and Citizen through the Arendtian critique of human rights. The second section explores EU citizenship as an institution that reproduces differential inclusion and an essentialist cultural identity. It also examines the postcolonial condition of Europe from the vantage
point of the simultaneously politicized and depoliticized migration question. The precarious status of certain migrants and would-be-migrants reveals the incapability of the human rights regime in the face of the states
reassertion of territorial sovereignty. Thus the essay also engages with the
work of contemporary advocates of cosmopolitanism such as Seyla Benhabib
(2004), who makes an ardent appeal to follow a Kant-inspired world federalism guided by moral universalism. I, however, contend that neither institutional nor morality-based versions of cosmopolitanism can sufficiently account for the profound implications of the struggles of non-members for a
political community. The last section accordingly engages with the political
significance of migrant subjectivity through Jacques Rancires (2004) reconfiguration of the subject of rights. The ambivalences of human rights politics
continue to haunt contemporary struggles that both contest and reiterate the
gap between the universal human and the national citizen.
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Chenchen Zhang
endt 1976: 302), which reveals the aporias of human rights. Historical evidence has shown, in her view, that the restoration of human rights has been
achieved so far only through the restoration or the establishment of national
rights (ibid: 299).
Thus there is no way for the stateless, or any person who is not recognized
as a member of a political community, to escape their fate of absolute rightlessness. To rescue human rights from being either void or tautological, one
must reconsider the dichotomy underlying the argument that humanity exists
only by virtue of the political community, now the nation-state, which turns
bare lives into political beings. The tension between the realm of the political
(of freedom) and the realm of private life (of necessity), or between bios and
zoe, sets them in rigid opposition to one another. I shall return later to this
problematic opposition. For now, another immediate question is also triggered by Arendts insights, namely, is citizenship to be conflated with nationality, the only attribute that marks the gap between Man and Citizen?
The legacy of the French Revolution serves as an important point of reference in revealing the different modalities of exclusion that constitutes the
founding moment of citizenship (Balibar 2004: 76). The distinction between
citoyens franais and citoyens actifs was immediately introduced in the 1791
Constitution. Emmanuel Joseph Sieys offered one of the earliest justifications for such a distinction: natural rights are those rights for whose preservation society is formed, and political rights are those rights by which society
is formed. He continues to state that women, children, foreigners, and those
who would not at all contribute to the public establishment must have no
active influence on public matters (Sieys 1985, cited in Agamben 1998:
130). In other words, they are merely subjects, not citizens in the genuine
sense of the term. This categorical border drawn between those who are qualified to be citizens and those who are not spells out a political anthropology of
the modern citizen, or of the human itself.2 The Enlightenment notion of rationality plays a key role here, as in Lockes discussions about the relationship between citizenship and property. Property implies first of all the property of the self (Mezzadra 2006: 33), which is, in Sandro Mezzadras words:
the capacity of an individual to rationally dominate his passions and to discipline himself
in order to be able to do that labour which constitutes in turn the foundation of every material property (ibid: 33).
Costas Douzinas claims that a person who enjoys the rights of man is above all a welloff citizen, a heterosexual, white and urban male (2007: 54).
247
de Mirabeaus speech at the National Assembly was in a way only an exaggerated version of Sieys philosophy:
[i]n proportioning the number of deputies to the population of France, we have taken into
consideration neither the number of our horses nor that of our mules (Trouillot 1995, cited
in Chatterjee 2007: 29).
While the narrative of evolutionary history could easily silence the significance of the Haitian Revolution, it constantly reminds us that the construction
of citizenship and of the subject of human rights have never been independent
of each other. In other words, both immanent others resident aliens,
women, children, and the poor and distant others the uncivilized
constituted the very condition of French citizenship, rather than simply occupying the pre-existing space of the non-citizen.
The key question, in my view, is whether this kind of politics consolidates the
boundary between the subjects of rights, who have benefited from the present
citizenship regime, and those who have only limited access to it? Or, to put it
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more pointedly, does the project of EU citizenship once again reinforce the
paradox of human rights, namely, that those who are most in need of rights
have the least of them?
Let us take a closer look at the formal institution of EU citizenship to address these questions: European Union citizenship, by definition, complements rather than replaces national citizenship; yet this does not prevent it
from becoming a sui generis form of political membership. Yasemin Soysal
(1995) has famously spoken of postnational membership in Europe, offering the general enjoyment of civil and social rights to all residents regardless
of their nationalities, as argued in the previous section.
The enjoyment of passive rights by foreigners, however, was already a
widely accepted principle in early liberalism. It is therefore the expansion of
political rights to nationals of other member states that makes citizenship of
the Union arguably the only formal constitutionalisation of postnational
citizenship (Cornelisse 2010: 108). Most notably, EU citizens have the right
to vote and stand for election at the municipal level in their state of residence
as well as within the European Parliament. The postnational rights package
also includes freedom of movement within the territory of the Union as well
as the right to appeal to the Ombudsman. Yet its complementary nature continues to maintain and reproduce the differentiating mechanisms of national
citizenship. The postnational rights package is only postnational for the
nationals of member states, and it remains the case that the sovereign state
alone decides to whom it grants citizenship. Here we can see once again the
contradictions the human rights discourse and the EU project seem to share:
while both are supposedly intended to transcend the limits of the nation-state,
both implicitly reaffirm the link between nationality and access to rights.
The political anthropology of the modern subject implied in earlier discourses on citizenship indicates that the structure of inclusion and exclusion
in the paradigm of national citizenship is not solely based on state territoriality; nor does it entirely overlap with ethno-cultural boundaries. The different
images of the Other, or of those who are deemed disqualified to be citizens
foreigners, nomads, the propertyless, and indigenous people mirror one
another and become integral to the construction of modern citizenship. From
this perspective, it is clear that the transformation of citizenship in the EU
does not only involve the promised triumph of civilization over eros
enthusiastically spoken of by optimistic commentators,3 but also, more importantly, creates an increasingly complex system of civic stratifications with
differential access to civil, economic and social rights (Kofman 2005: 453),
depending on different categories of status. There are full-fledged national
3
The Marcusean expression eros and civilization is used by Joseph H. H. Weiler (1999:
324355) to outline the; key issues in the debates on EU citizenship. He contends that the
ideal form of European citizenship should be the embodiment of Civilisation, whereas the
national stands for Eros.
249
citizens, EU citizens, permanent residents, temporary migrant workers, refugees and asylum seekers, ethnic minorities, and so on. But outside all these
statuses, a group of the population lives in the absence of any legal recognition (Monforte/Dufour 2011: 4). According to the normative understanding
of the word person discussed above they can be deemed non-persons
(Dal Lago 2009). Depending on the context, different terms such as undocumented, illegal, or irregular migrants are used to refer to those people
who live in a country where they do not hold authorized documents for entrance or establishment.4 Being illegalized by virtue of their mere presence,
undocumented migrants are not stateless people in the strict sense of the term.
Yet, among all excluded groups, they are the most reminiscent of Arendts
warning, more than half a century ago, about being denied that one human
right, or the right to have rights.
This is particularly true in those countries or cities where undocumented
migrants suffer from the strongest isolation from other social groups and the
toughest restrictions on their mobility. For instance, the movement restriction
law of Germany (Residenzpflicht) defines a specific status of Duldung or
tolerance. People falling under this category are not deported immediately,
but their mobility is highly restricted, and they can barely leave the district
they are placed in by the state authority (Monforte/Dufour 2011: 10). In this
extreme case, not only is the migration problem depoliticized as a bureaucratic matter of population management, the life of the migrant itself also
becomes apolitical because of the ubiquitous border that separates it from the
rest of society.5 The loss of the relevance of speech, as Arendt argues, and the
loss of all human relationships established by living in a community amounts
to the loss of the most essential attribute of human life.
The predicament of undocumented migration reveals the paradox between
the universal norms of human rights and the exclusive citizenship regime of
the nation-state through which the articulation of rights is made possible.
However, this is only part of the story. The perceived problem of immigration has evoked both depoliticizing and politicizing responses in European
countries and beyond. In debates on migration, political parties, electoral
campaigns, and very often the mass media tend to employ a rhetoric of national identity and thereby imply that the political self-understanding of the
political community is at stake (Huysmans 2000: 163). Furthermore, the process of European integration has contributed to the creation of what tienne
4
In this chapter, I use these terms interchangeably, even as I critique the negative connotations attached to some of these categories. I am also aware of the important difference between irregular and illegal migrants in legal terms, which is concerned with whether the
state considers the violation of its established norms on the entry and residence of foreign
nationals as a criminal act or as a statutory offence (Sciortino 2004).
One could also argue that the very process of depoliticizing certain groups of the population
is essential to the maintenance of the politicized norms on which the biopolitics of sovereignty is grounded.
250
Chenchen Zhang
Stein Rokkan (1999: 104) makes a distinction between the geographical space and the
membership space in his analytical framework of boundary-building.
251
252
Chenchen Zhang
According to Beck and Edgar Grande, the traditional concept of society and the social
theory this concept is based upon only recognizes mobility within societies, while being unable to address the idea of the mobility of whole societies. They argue that the enlargement
of the EU offers a unique opportunity to facilitate this mobility through the process of border-transcending preventive Europeanisation (Beck/Grande 2007: 122, italics in original).
See, for example, the briefing paper Hidden Emergency prepared by Judith Sunderland
(2012) for Human Rights Watch.
253
sure a high and uniform level of checks on persons and surveillance (Council of the European Union 2004). Although the ruling of the European Court
of Human Rights in the case of Hirsi Jamaa and Others v. Italy9 is considered
to be ground-breaking in protecting the human rights of migrants on the high
seas (Hessbruegge 2012, Scheinin 2012), it ironically also reaffirms that the
implementation of international human rights law has not altered and continues to accord with the territorial configuration of state sovereignty. The Court
ordered the Italian government to pay monetary compensation to the victims
and to obtain assurances from the Libyan authorities, which have proven
difficult to secure.10 Even if the compensation was to be paid and if Libya was
to ensure the freedom of the applicants from abuse, the divide between those
who suffer, those who rescue, and those who are termed evil is once again
reconstituted in processes of this kind, as convincingly argued by Costas
Douzinas. The victims are always powerless, faceless and nameless, and the
goodwill of the savers to right wrongs in no way puts this divide into question (Douzinas 2007: 69).
11
European Court of Human Rights. Hirsi Jamaa and Others v Italy (2012). ECHR Application no. 27765/09.
For instance, one of the justifications put forward by the Italian government for not paying
the full compensation ordered was that it could not ascertain the whereabouts of some of the
victims. This was criticized by prominent Italian legal practitioners and activists during a
consultation between the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, civil
society actors, and academics in Florence in October 2012.
This critique is not completely fair; see, for example, Gndo du (2011).
254
Chenchen Zhang
consequently could only be members of a political community in which individuals recognize each other as equal and distinct (Schaap 2011: 34).
Rancire, seeing this as problematic, tries to revisit the question of the
subject of the rights of Man, and hence the subject of politics as well. He
contends that the rights of man are not
the rights of a single subject that would be at once the source and the bearer of the rights
and would only use the rights that she or he possesses (Rancire 2004: 202).
255
Migrants also emphasize the historical links between their home countries and
the country in which they take up struggles:
Where do we come from, we Sans-Papiers of Saint-Bernard? [] [w]e are all from former
French colonies [] So its not an accident that we find ourselves in France: our countries
have had a relationship with France for centuries (Ciss 1997).
Conclusion
The politics of citizenship and migration in the European Union reveal the
paradox between the universalistic promise of postnationalism and the territorially confined citizenship regime on one hand, and highlights the postcolonial condition of Europe within global power structures on the other. In this
essay, I have sought to examine postcolonial and post-structuralist critiques of
human rights to critically engage with these issues. Whereas the former focus
on inequalities and domination, the latter re-appeal to the presupposition of
256
Chenchen Zhang
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Frederick Cowell1
Introduction
Relativism as an ethical philosophy is metaethical; it provides a framework
for arriving at moral conclusions but does not necessarily establish a moral
conclusion. The only conclusion that relativism actually draws is, as Graham
Long notes, that objective morality is relative to something, whether that be
a particular culture, society, or individuals worldview (2011: 209). The
concept of culture serves as a reference point for cultural relativists from
which to make an argument that a stated universal moral norm is not, or
should not be, universally applied across all cultures. Often cultural relativism
is associated with non-Western societies that resist the application of human
rights law due to the stated incompatibility of their cultural traditions with
international human rights law, which itself is often criticized for having
emerged out of the Enlightenment tradition and for its complicity in colonialism.
This essay argues that Western states, in particular the states that are signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), are themselves engaging in a process of cultural relativism, what I term defensive
relativism, when they resist the universal application of human rights law.
Both Britain and France have rich intellectual traditions of human rights
stemming from the European Enlightenment, but increasingly both governments have been employing cultural arguments to engage in a form of relativist resistance to the operation of the European Court of Human Rights. Drawing on the theories of Gayatri Spivak (2004) and Homi Bhabha (2006) the
first section of this chapter analyzes how culture is mobilized to resist the
universalizing norms of international human rights law. The second section
engages with the critical human rights theories of Costas Douzinas (2008) and
Jose Alves (2000) to explore how the universality of supranational human
rights instruments, such as the ECHR, poses a conceptual threat to the sovereignty of Western states causing states to engage in defensive relativism.
1
The author would like to thank Jose Bellido of Birkbeck College and Fletch Williams of
Trinity College Dublin for their helpful comments and revisions on earlier drafts of this
chapter.
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Frederick Cowell
To set this argument in context, let me briefly provide the historical background: Shortly after the end of World War Two with the Cold War at its
peak, Western European governments created the Council of Europe a
supranational supervisory organization with the stated aim of promoting democratic governance which began the process of drafting the ECHR. It is an
unmistakably liberal document, reflecting the British common law tradition,
the Enlightenment notion of universal personhood as well as entitlement to
core civil rights. In order to make the document a living instrument, the
ECHR mandated the creation of the European Court of Human Rights which
would, subject to the consent of state parties, be able to act as a final court of
appeal on human rights matters, effectively acting as a supranational human
rights court. The Courts work was initially limited, and even though a large
number of cases were brought before it from Italy and the United Kingdom
(mostly in relation to Northern Ireland) it was not until the 1990s, when formerly communist Eastern European states joined the Council of Europe, that
the number of applications to the European Court of Human Rights increased
significantly and managing the volume of cases became problematic (Greer
2006: 3340). Additionally in the 1990s, cases involving immigration, sexual
orientation, and privacy increasingly started to be brought before the Court,
reflecting the changing circumstances of many member states as they became
more affluent and culturally diverse (cf. Dembour 2006, Greer 2006). However, these cases were increasingly perceived by domestic polities as threats
to national sovereignty. With the escalation of the War on Terror, this wave
of criticism became more widespread as governments pursued a range of antiterrorism policies that restricted human rights. The European Court of Human
Rights in turn ruled such measures as being contrary to the ECHR. At the
beginning of 2010, two issues the rights of prisoners to vote in Britain and
the right of Muslim women to wear the Burqa in public in France led two of
the Courts founding members to take up a relativist stance on these issues.2
In January 2012, the British Prime Minister David Cameron delivered a
speech to the Council of Europe which illustrated this increasingly relativistic
trend of opposition to the European Court of Human Rights. While insisting
that human rights were a cause that runs deep in the British heart and long in
British history, he went on to attack the Court for interfering in national
decisions on criminal and immigration matters, emphasizing that national
institutions were the sole forum for deciding such matters (Guardian: 2012).
Claudio Coradetti argues that cultural relativism has three different
strands descriptive, metaethical, and normative (2009: 36). Metaethical
relativism is defined above; descriptive relativism upholds differences between cultures and infers that universal values are incommensurable with
cultural practices, whereas normative relativism holds that what is morally
2
The cases are Hirst v UK (no.2) [2005] ECHR 681 and S.A.S. v France (4385/11).
Defensive Relativism
263
right in a given situation ultimately depends on the context and culture (ibid:
37). This chapter is principally concerned with theorizing the practice of
relativism, rather than an identification of its analytic components, but these
different elements of relativism are relevant to the discussion of the emergence and trajectory of cultural relativism. The central aim of this essay is to
demonstrate that the resistance of European states to the European Court of
Human Rights should be understood as a form of defensive relativism. While
anti-colonialist struggles often mobilized relativist arguments to challenge the
imperialist universalist tendencies of European norms, ideas, and practices,
this essay will unpack how the former colonial powers are employing defensive relativism as a justifying strategy to protect national sovereignty.
Decolonizing Relativism
Dominant notions of cultural and racial superiority of Europeans were central
to the project of colonialism and relied on a teleological vision of societies
advancing from a state of primitiveness to modernity (Rentlen 1988: 56-57).
Relativistic arguments emerged as a form of contestation of the assumption
that human rights, as values and norms of modernity, were a de facto superior
system of morality vis--vis the systems of morality found in territories under
colonial rule, which were often dismissed as primitive or savage (Rentlen
1988, Hatch 1997). Relativism as a political idea gained traction in the 1960s
and 1970s among the governments of the newly decolonized states, who were
still engaged in the wider political project of negotiating the legacy of colonialism. The Enlightenment notions of human as well as of rights, which
shaped the idea of human rights in international law, played a crucial role in
legitimizing discourses of European colonialism. At the core of Enlightenment notions of human rights was the idea that all human beings possessed
intrinsic and inalienable rights, even as it was argued that human nature could
be rationally and scientifically controlled. James Griffin argues that to a large
extent this understanding of human rights is still prevalent (2008: 13). The
idea of universality has its origins in theories of natural law. While this was
contested by some Enlightenment theorists of rights like Jeremy Bentham, it
nonetheless provided the basis for the justification that there were some inalienable human rights (ibid: 11). European colonization had two distinct impacts on these ideas: firstly, colonial powers dictated who counts as human,
who should have rights, and what kind of rights should be universal (Barreto
2012). Secondly, modern human rights law, which came into being after the
1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights, was heavily influenced by the
colonial past of human rights. As the universal norms of international human
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Frederick Cowell
rights law began their life in the European colonial project, resistance to human rights norms in postcolonial contexts often drew on cultural arguments to
contest the normative expectations of human rights instruments or to defend
abuses of human rights in the name of cultural practices (Donnelly 2007).
In order to critically assess relativism it is essential to make two observations about the ontology of human rights. Firstly, it is necessary to distinguish
the Enlightenment theories of human rights from the practices during this era,
which were principally focused on granting and securing liberties from the
state for a minority of individuals. Liberties are possessory rights, or rights
that are designed to exclude others. Domenico Losurdo (2011) notes that the
rise of political liberalism in the eighteenth century saw an increase in liberties as well as the intensification of racism, exploitation, and slavery. The
Enlightenment legacy of human rights was thus fraught with contradictions, as
the historical moment of the inception of universal human rights was deeply
intertwined with its systematic denial to non-Europeans. Accompanying the
economic, social, and military project of colonialism, was the process of
subject constitution on both ends of the colonial divide in disciplines like
biology, literature, history, philosophy, and anthropology that provided legitimacy for colonialism. Spivak explains that this has had a pervasive impact on
the processes of decolonization (2006: 338340). When applied to human
rights law, Makau Mutua argues that these colonial discourses created a narrative of savagery and victimhood, where savages were defined as a
cultural deviation from human rights (2001: 203). These narratives continue
into the postcolonial era heavily influencing modern human rights politics
(ibid). Yet, as argued by Spivak, it is incorrect to simply reject human rights
as Eurocentric, not least because a growing number of human rights workers
are from/in the global South, laboring to counter the detrimental impact of
colonialism, even as they inadvertently reinforce neocolonial structures
(2004: 525).
A second crucial distinction needs to be drawn between the colonial imposition of international law and the idea of human rights. International law
was employed to legitimize and facilitate the process of colonialism and define the territoriality of the new world and the European colonies (Barreto
2012). James Whitman argues that Western law has within it a missionary
impulse generated both by a religious philosophy and by a teleological view
of the inevitability of Western progress, which creates an idealistic urge to
bring [its] benefits to the rest of the world (2009: 307). Along similar lines,
Anthony Anghie traces how colonialism was central to the formation of international law, even as the imperial character of modern international law continues to define the nature of postcolonial states by determining their legal
structures (2004). Institutions of modern international law perpetuate asymmetries of power introduced during the colonial era. Human rights required
the framework of international law to enforce their universality, both through
Defensive Relativism
265
their definition and codification as Conventions as well as through the institutional support of the United Nations, which is authorized to take action to
protect the victims of human rights abuses. Spivak observes that the dispensers of human rights must acknowledge that just as the idea of human rights is
contingent upon [the] French Revolution, and the Universal Declaration
upon the historical events that led to the Second World War, modern human
rights are interlinked with the postcolonial turbulence and global economic restructuring of international law (2004: 530). The thrust of Spivaks
argument is that human rights and human rights violations continue to be
mediated through imperialist lenses, either through institutions created during
colonialism or via epistemic frameworks and a pedagogical culture that continues to reproduce the North/South divide in the construction and identification of human suffering. Thus while human rights campaigns and human
rights law have been mobilized to emancipate people from colonial rule and
protect the rights of minorities, human rights require the imperial project of
international law to underwrite its universality and ensure its universal application.
Cultural relativism emerged in part as a mechanism for challenging the
universalism of international law. Relativism was projected against the modernizing impulses of colonialism and is defined within the alterity created by
international law which situated culture, or more precisely the discourse of
culture, as a source of resistance to colonial universality (Pahuja 2005: 456).
A cultures domains of difference, according to Bhabha, allow communities
to challenge the normative expectations of development and progress which
are intrinsic to the project of modernity of international law (2006: 2). The
role culture plays in opposing universality is described by Bhabha as the
articulation of difference making relativism a functional process that
utilizes the vehicle of cultural difference to oppose the formation, interpretation, and enforcement of the universal norms of international human rights
law, locating culture at the enunciatory present of modernity (2006: 341).
Culture becomes the point of resistance to the imperialist project of international law because its universalist pretentions necessarily demand a continuing expansion of the universal. Counter-discourses of culture provide alternate source of values and norms to counteract these processes (Fitzpatrick
2001: 209). On the other side of the postcolonial divide, culture comes to be
shaped as the alterity of international law, which is structurally predisposed to
project what lies beyond it as anti- modern and primitive. The categorization
of non-Western values and norms as being cultural or non-modern is
accompanied by the promise that they can progress towards modernity by
overcoming the particular and embracing the universal.
Defensive relativism is a variety of cultural relativism in that it exploits
culture as a basis for resisting the universal norms of international law. It is
founded upon what Coradetti terms moderate metaethical relativism in that
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Frederick Cowell
population by managing the processes of life and death (Douzinas 2008). The
reassertion of sovereign control over the population in the course of the War
on Terror, as Julian Reid argues, can be seen as a defense of the biopolitically grounded system of Western sovereignty (2009: 136).
In the name of state sovereignty, Western states have resisted the European Court of Human Rights, especially in cases relating to immigration and
terrorism. Since 1996, the Court has prevented individuals from being deported from member states when they are at risk of being tortured in the state
they were being deported to. As deportation is a key strategy for dealing with
individuals suspected of terrorism, these rulings have been politically unpopular. In 2012, when the Court ruled that Abu Qatada, a key terror suspect,
could not be deported because he was at risk of being tortured, there was a
political outcry within the UK. The ruling was perceived as a security threat
and attack on British sovereignty. As the neo-conservative US politician John
Bolton argued, the Court was undermining the UKs security to the extent that
it was faced with the choice of either remaining a sovereign country or being
taken over by European institutions (Gardiner 2012).
Defensive Relativism
271
Research into cases brought against the UK found that the government lost one in 50 cases
(Donald et al. 2012: 42).
Margin of Appreciation is the technical term for the process whereby the court acknowledges in its judgments that rights will be interpreted differently in different countries and as
a consequence gives the state party some latitude.
The Brighton Declaration was a Council of Europe agreement on the direction of the European Court of Human Rights, which highlights the sovereignty of states and the importance
of the margin of appreciation (Bates 2012).
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Frederick Cowell
the only kind of public life and public debate possible in most complex societies (2009: 50).
The conflation of rights and wants within contemporary human rights culture in many Western societies has complicated attempts to protect human
rights at the supranational level. In Western postmodern societies, Douzinas
argues, the phrase I have a right to X is used interchangeably with the
expressions I desire or want, and this is reflected at many different points
in the mediated sphere (2008: 12). Mary-Ann Glendons study of rights culture in the US notes how the language of rights has created highly individualistic assertions of freedom and desire, with many individuals describing rights
in terms of providing the freedom to do whatever we please which is
framed in the language of no compromise (1991: 9). This not only weakens
the idea of rights as tools of political organization, but also makes them into
instruments of governmental control. The conflation of rights and desire
makes them into a channel for accomplishing individual aims and goals, instead of instruments of wider social and political transformation. The media
in the UK conflates the differences between accounts of families demanding
social housing, students campaigning against university tuition, and celebrities seeking privacy from paparazzi as human rights claims. Whether this is
an accurate account of the legality of rights claims is irrelevant, as the media,
which conveys discourses about rights, often conflates rights and wants
(Glendon 1991). This conflation progressively becomes an ethical reality
which sovereign politics seeks to dominate as these forms of rights are essential for the managerial process of governing the postmodern state.
Conclusion
The Enlightenment idea of universality and the related colonial practice of
expansion of international law are part of the genealogy of international human rights law. Cultural relativism emerges as a doctrine to counter the implicit assumption of colonial universality that culturally divergent moral practices were savage and anti-modern. Defensive relativism is a variant of
cultural relativism that is often employed by states resisting the universal
application of human rights norms. As I have argued above, this is increasingly exploited by Western states in the name of sovereignty to resist judgments
of the European Court of Human Rights.
Cultural arguments serve as an alternate source of value to the universality
of human rights norms, which are transcendentally grounded outside the state
and thus outside the national political community. Culture plays a complex
role within defensive relativism as it refers not only to processes that can be
described as culturally different by a descriptive relativist, but also refers to
Defensive Relativism
273
legal processes and practices of sovereign states that conflict with universal
norms. In the context of what Alves (2000) calls postmodern states, where
culture and national institutions have become fused, a conflict between national institutions and supranational institutions becomes re-framed as a clash
between national culture and the imposed universality of supranational organizations. Culture in this context is little more than a reaction against universality, but in many ways this highlights the continuing tension between universality and culture a phenomenon that affects both Western and non-Western
states alike. Defensive relativism as a conceptual tool helps understand how
relativism is not confined to societies classified as primitive in colonist
discourse, but is a reaction of nation-states to universality. The critique of
human rights on cultural grounds primarily focuses on its use in postcolonial
contexts. In contrast, defensive relativism explains how states with the intellectual traditions that created the ontology of universality now adopt relativistic positions towards human rights.
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.
IV. Democracy
Lyn Ossome
Introduction
The relationship between democratization and human rights is often taken for
granted, and the dominance of human rights as the discursive language of
justice even more so. The reason for this can be traced back to the incomplete
shift towards democratization in postcolonial African states, beginning in the
structural adjustment period of the late 1980s. This period was historically
important because, among other factors, it was informed by an intensified
demand for liberties. This opening up of political spaces was, however, also
marked by the diminishing engagement with class analysis and the overall
failure to link oppressive social relations that were emerging in the context of
decolonization, such as homophobia, xenophobia, and racism, to the obscuring of class dynamics. As such, while the emphasis on recognition has been
successful in highlighting hitherto ignored forms of oppression, some observers have regretted the fact that it seems to have been coupled with the abandonment of class politics associated with the politics of distribution (Phillips
1999).
The reconfiguring of human rights in the course of the neoliberal turn has
ushered in the discontinuity between civil and political rights and economic
justice, contributing to a significant withdrawal from popular democracy. At
present, the rights discourse is mobilized by powerful countries to justify
aggressive interventionist approaches, while at the same time claiming that
guaranteeing rights to publics set them on a developmental path. Thus, publics encumbered by economic lack and exclusion can paradoxically experience freedom. Globally, workers distressed by worsening economic and
social conditions, are increasingly protesting against and exposing the brutality of states austerity measures as well as state-sanctioned violence perpetrated in the name of maintaining law and order, peace keeping, and defense. It is ironical that a debate is conducted in countries like South Africa
on the possibility of a democratic developmental state without addressing
issues of economic empowerment and equitable development. This has much
to do with the narrow human rights perspective that has prevailed in public
discourse (Moyo/Yeros 2011). This trend is more clearly observable in do-
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nor driven countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and Uganda, where interest is sharply focused on constitutionalism,
rights, and liberties, while the economic demands of the population are neglected. The problematic nature of this trade-off lies in the way in which
human rights, when claimed or applied in specific situations, mask particular
interests and ideological motives. Such interests mirror the neocolonial pacts
through which African states were granted ostensible political freedom and
autonomy while perpetuating the oppressive economic status quo. As such,
democratization as a postcolonial emancipatory project continues to generate
more questions than it answers. What these insights primarily reveal is an
antagonistic relationship between the liberal democratic conception of human
rights on the one hand, and social/redistributive justice as a fundamental aim
of radical democracy on the other.
This essay is concerned with democratization as an emancipatory project
in postcolonial countries, where the dynamics of power and the constraints of
liberalism often negate or undermine mechanisms for redistributive justice.
Focusing on monopoly capitalism and state sovereignty, the liberal human
rights framework will be critiqued. I argue that liberal notions of human
rights, applied in contexts of political, cultural, and economic exclusion and
lack, actually reproduce human rights violations rather than resolving them.
Drawing on Wendy Browns (2010) critique of waning state sovereignty and
Jacques Rancires (2006) radical notion of the democratic man, I argue
that through the implicit inclusion and rewarding of compliant/disciplined
individuals, human rights within liberal democratic regimes function as instruments of exclusion of those subjects constructed as undesirable. This
strategy functions in two ways: firstly, through consumerism the commodification or trading of rights through the market, which walls out those who
are structurally unable to access the market place; and secondly, through the
liberal notion of universality, which obscures the multiple and intersecting
nature of identities and desires to be found within the polity, rendering invisible the rights claims of those whose identities deviate from the norm.
A number of critical debates that emerge from similar concerns begin with
the critique of the liberal democratic state. For instance, Chantal Mouffe
views liberal democracy as more than a mere form of government, characterizing it as a regime that organizes human co-existence in a specific political
form through the articulation of two different traditions: on one hand, political liberalism (i.e., rule of law, separation of powers, and individual rights)
and, on the other hand, the democratic tradition of popular sovereignty
(Mouffe 2000: 18). What is at stake, she argues, is the legitimation of conflict
and division, the emergence of individual liberty, and the assertion of equal
liberty for all (ibid: 19). What we witness, however, is the negation of conflict
and the undermining of difference within the liberal human rights framework,
which proceeds from a universalist and essentialist point of view. According
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Human rights, Patricia Williams (1991) has argued, impose an artificial barrier between opposites like progressive/unprogressive, righted/wronged, legitimate/illegitimate; they maintain illogical barriers between that which is to be
hallowed and that which needs rescuing. Through coded conditions, the idea
that states are ultimately responsible for their own stability is constructed, at
the same time as the notion of state sovereignty is forcibly retrenched though
a discourse of autonomy. Yet if, as Brown (2010) has argued, sovereignty
is no longer to be found in the nation-state, but rather in political economy,
then it becomes clear that the emergence of a liberal human rights regime
1
Despite its claim to be more democratic, Mouffe unpacks how such a perspective prevents
us from recognizing how certain differences are constructed as relations of subordination. It
should therefore be challenged by a radical democratic politics (Mouffe 2000: 20).
Neoliberal capitalism imposes upon developing economies conditions to measure development and freedom. This democratization agenda includes such measures as structural adjustment programs, privatization schemes, trade liberalization, and the entrenchment of the
human rights regime.
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ought to be viewed in relation to, and as a response to, the crisis of waning
state sovereignty. This response is characterized by the hegemonic interference in state matters through (the imposition) of laws and the international
human rights regime, both of which sometimes openly aim to subvert or
supersede the sovereignty of states (Brown 2010: 22). One of the subjective
manifestations of this political interference is discrimination at the level at
which various group identities are essentialized for the sake of maintaining a
semblance of the whole, what Heidegger termed a reassuring world picture (cited in Brown 2012: 118). Responding to universalized oppression(s)
through a liberal human rights framework thus becomes the new method of
exercising power and monopoly, which post-Westphalian states increasingly compromised, as Brown notes, by growing transnational flows of capital,
people, ideas, goods, violence, political and religious fealty can no longer
exert (ibid).3
Although the manipulation of power remains central to the state project,
what is just as apparent in the varying expressions of power in postcolonial
Africa is its highly dispersed nature. This resonates with Rita Abrahamsens
insight that resistance to power is no longer to be found in simply seizing
state power or the means of production (2003: 209). The multifariousness of
power suggests that the task of understanding the particular ways in which
human rights function as the emerging signification and boundary of state
sovereignty must be discovered in the micro-foundations of the application
of rights/power. Critical questions emerge out of such a framing. In a discussion of his seminal work On the Postcolony, Achille Mbembe poses a set of
foundational questions that seek to distinguish the object of power from the
subjections which power produces. He asks under what practical conditions is
the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised? Who is the
subject of this right? What does the implementation of such a right tell us
about the entity that is put to death and about the relation of enmity that sets it
against its murderer? How can we account for the contemporary ways in
which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance, or of the fight
against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective? (cf. Hoeller n.d.).
These questions point to the reality that much of what is spoken in ostensibly objective, unmediated voices is in fact mired in hidden subjectivities
and unexamined claims that make property of others beyond the self, all the
3
Nation-state sovereignty has been undercut as well by neoliberal rationality, which recognizes no sovereign apart from entrepreneurial decision makers (large and small), which displaces legal and political principles (especially liberal commitments to universal inclusion,
equality, liberty, and the rule of law) with market criteria, and which demotes the political
sovereign to managerial status. Nation-state sovereignty has also been eroded by the steady
growth and importance of international economic and governance institutions such as the
International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization (Brown 2010: 22).
Democracys Subjections
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while denying such connections (Williams 1991: 11). If human rights claim
such objectivity, whom do they include who is constructed as deserving of
rights and how does this construction proceed? Who/what is excluded or
suffers? And how does this inclusion/exclusion binary render what is then
considered as reality? In short, what casualties are produced out of the
normative framing of human rights as it operates within liberal democracy?
Drawing from these critical debates, this essay seeks to highlight the limitations of justice in contexts where alienation, physical and military violation,
and immiseration are observed despite ongoing democratization processes.
The liberal human rights regime has pushed the boundaries beyond the fantasy that the state will protect its citizens towards an even more intangible desire for the global protector. The antagonisms and tensions arising out of
the ensuing struggle between the nation-state and competing global sovereign
powers, the reproduction of a human rights discourse as knowledge, and the
effect of such constructions on the democratization project form the core
focus of analysis. The paper considers these questions in two different political contexts in Africa: Uganda and South Africa. These cases provide examples that demonstrate that the exploitation, immiseration, and cultural violation of marginalized groups is also the condition for capitalisms accommodation of human rights claims within these liberal democracies.
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economic development, fiscal discipline, and the free market (cf. Berkeley
1994, Caplan 1997, McKinley 1998).
Political spaces opened up after the NRM takeover, in part due to the fact
that the NRM had yet to consolidate its hold over the country. But as it created and solidified its control over various institutions, it also began to tighten
its grip on those political spaces. The relative stability in the country after
NRM came to power, combined with Ugandas rapid economic growth at the
time, initially won Museveni and his movement considerable support, and
many were willing to overlook the persistent constraints on democratization
(Tripp 2000: 56). These positive changes were, however, associated with
some disturbing developments that included an increasingly ruthless use of
state power to keep the ruling elite in place, growing patronage-based corruption, the failure to resolve the long-running civil war in the North, intensification of North-South inequalities and hostilities, chronic aid dependence, and
weak state capacity (Brett 2008: 351). Liberalization in Uganda was only
opposed by a tiny group of politicians, officials, and others who had direct
access to the rents available through the state,4 while being supported by the
majority of the population who view the state as a criminal conspiracy against
the rest of society.5 Structural adjustment and the very generous aid that came
with it generated widespread benefits and, therefore, consolidated the political legitimacy of the regime (Brett 2008: 359). However, the NRMs intolerance of opposition and its moves towards a more repressive stance and exclusionary posture towards opponents has threatened this legitimacy in recent
years (Galooba-Mutebi 2008: 23). Riots over high commodity prices, routine
harassment and imprisonment of opposition politicians, and the militarization
of society are all symptomatic of a state desperate to consolidate its waning
authority.6 The US and the West have turned a blind eye to the massive corruption, the suppression of freedom of expression and of the press, and that of
dissidents, and have continued to pour aid and donor funding into the country.
In part, this is owed to the fact that Museveni has become a vocal supporter of
4
5
6
In part, this had been maintained through the military provision of the coercive force needed
to maintain regime security, and the assurance by military leaders that competitive interest
groups would not develop modes of behavior that are detrimental to state security. Activities of such groups are carefully monitored by military elites to ensure that none develops
enough potential for violence to capture the government. In return for helping maintain the
regime, the military receives rents via a share of government expenditure (see Kimenyi/Mbaku 1995: 701).
By 1973, the state had lost both its legitimacy and capacity to deliver services, and most
services and economic activities had been effectively privatized and informalized.
Earlier signs included far-reaching proposals for constitutional reform, through which
Museveni sought to lift the constitutional provision that stipulates that a president can stand
for elections for only two terms. Rather than seeking an amendment that would allow a third
term, Museveni recommended that term limits be removed altogether. Musevenis exit from
the helm of Ugandas leadership is uncertain as he has now amended the constitution to allow himself to serve indefinitely (Oloka-Onyango 2004).
Democracys Subjections
285
the War on Terrorism. In this context, it has been argued that this massive
influx of aid may actually have impeded democratic reforms, because it made
the government less dependent on popular support (Rice 2006).
Historically, foreign and national security affairs have been the policy areas most difficult to bring under (liberal) democratic control. Reasons of
state generally persuade even those governments formed by parties ideologically opposed to these positions. The implication for state democracy is that
the more important foreign policy and national security become in the life of
the state, the less likely the state is to prove susceptible to democratic control
(Dryzek 1996: 74). Consequently, while on the one hand, Ugandas suppression of human rights and the overall suspension of democratic practices conform to realist international relations theories, on the other hand, the contradictions borne out of the states parallel accommodation of a conservative
rights agenda led by the US evangelical movement defy any normative understanding of Ugandas democratic project. This is due to the fact that although
the state has sought to limit civil liberties through the suppression of LGBTI
rights, in doing so it appears to be fomenting a diverse queer discursive space
in the country.7 This confrontation and the fetishized elevation of a queer
discourse to the status of a national debate ought to be read as a function of
the disciplining power of US and Western governments. The NRM government has maintained an ambivalent stance on the issue, at times apparently
succumbing to intense international pressure to veto the controversial AntiHomosexuality Bill,8 and at other times endorsing the conservative backlash
underpinned in localized discourses by the cultural-religious aggression towards Western values. In short, Ugandas accommodation of the LGBTI
rights discourse is not only deceptive but diversionary, too. For what the
7
Indeed, as Sokari Ekine (2010) observes, the increased visibility of LGBTI activists has
incited public discussions in the media, facilitated easier access to information, and compelled people to think about the effect of exclusionary rights in their society. This sphere, I
would propose, is an emergent counter-public, which has the potential to broaden the possibility of extending democracy and increasing civil society participation in resistance to the
dominant public sphere. See also Fenton/Downey 2003: 15.
A campaign delivered half a million signatures to Museveni, various governments lobbied
the Ugandan government, the German government threatened to cut aid, and currently, the
US Congress has amended financial legislation (with bipartisan support) that would cut aid
to countries deemed to be persecuting gay people. Introducing the legislation, Congressman
Barney Frank highlighted Uganda and noted that the USA have a fairly influential voice in
the development area. To quote US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the treasury department will continue to instruct the U.S. executive directors at each of the MDBs [multilateral development banks] to seek to channel MDB resources away from those countries
whose governments engage in a pattern of gross violations of human rights (Geithner
2011). The European Parliament on its part passed a resolution in December, reminding
Africa that the EU is responsible for more than half of development aid and remains Africa's most important trading partner and that in all actions conducted under the terms of
various partnerships sexual orientation is a protected category of non-discrimination (Canning 2011).
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Democracys Subjections
287
and the clients who buy their labor power. Contemporary sociological texts,
Rancire points out, replace the bourgeoisie with another subject, democratic man, from which point it becomes possible, he argues, to transform
the reign of exploitation into the reign of equality, and to make democratic
equality identical to the equal exchange of market services (2006: 19). The
bourgeois classes, concerned only with profitability, create a rights economy that may be deemed as the commodification of rights. Within the liberal
democratic state, rights enter into the realm of market services, alongside
commodities, and the democratic man expresses the equality of the relations of exchange as the equality of human rights (ibid).
The conservative anti-homosexuality debate is the means through which
the public is drawn into a nationalist discourse ostensibly to protect the states
and the peoples sovereignty. Human rights in this sense have emerged as the
barrier or filter through which an us versus them is constructed, and the
us is universalized to obliterate differences of class, ethnicity, sexuality,
geography, and gender, which differentially oppress the Ugandan public under the impoverishing current conditions of monopoly capitalism and militarization at work in the country.
The RDP is directed at addressing the social aspects of sustainable development by meeting
the basic needs of people and encouraging people-driven processes. GEAR is the countrys
main economic strategy and an attempt to address issues of economic inequity, as well as
the countrys continued economic growth.
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Africa. Critics of the RDP White Paper (WP) (cf. Republic of South Africa
1994: 9) largely conferred upon it a reactionary status. Asgar Adelzadeh and
Vishnu Padayachee, for instance, view it as representing a very significant
compromise to the neo-liberal, trickle down economic policy preferences of
the old regime (1994: 2). Elsewhere, it was argued that the framing of the
RDP and the White Paper submerged crucial political issues (cf. Wolpe 1995:
91).
GEAR, some scholars suggested, was much more than a shift to harsh neoliberalism, but more importantly also a redefinition of the National Democratic Revolution NDR (Hart 2007). According to Gillian Hart, GEAR
asserted new technologies of rule, which, among other things, made social
support conditional on the correct attitudes and aspirations (2007: 93). The
redefinition of the NDR embodies a powerful drive to contain popular mobilization. An initial manifesto of this broader state project was an ANC Discussion Document issued in 1996 which, while not making explicit reference
to the NDR, asserted the imperative for containing the instinct towards
economism on the part of ordinary workers in the following terms:
If the democratic movement allowed that the subjective approach to socio-economic development represented by economism should overwhelm the scientific approach of the
democratic movement towards such development, it could easily create the conditions for
the possible counter-revolutionary defeat of the democratic revolution (paragraph 6.11, in
Hart 2007: 94).
The implication was that the NDRs primary consideration would not be to
address the lived realities of the people, but rather that the legitimacy of
rights claims would be determined by the conditional parameters negotiated
for the revolution. In the case of GEAR or RDP, the extent to which rights
demands could be made were already constituted within their neoliberal limits. Or, as Hart has argued, GEAR can be seen as part of a vanguardist project
to exercise a new form of activism defined in technocratic and hierarchical
terms, and to assert the dominance of a transnationally-connected technocratic elite over mass mobilization and action (2007: 94). The point to note
here is that mass actions and protests, where they have been tolerated in South
Africa, have been delimited by the very foundational documents and policies
that made their expression possible.
As Harold Wolpe had predicted, by mid-2003, the ANC began asserting
itself as a developmental state and effecting a redefinition of the NDR in
terms of a First and Second Economy (Hart 2007: 96). Hart (2006) sees the
First/Second Economy discourses as part of an effort to contain the challenges from oppositional movements that reached their peak by 2002 and to render them subject to government intervention. What is significant about this
discourse, she argues, is the way it defines a segment of society that is superfluous to the modern economy and in need of paternal guidance: those
falling within this category are citizens, but second class. As such, they are
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The basic income grant (BIG) is seen as part of a comprehensive social security system,
in explicit reference to Section 7.26 of the Welfare White Paper. The BIG was set at R100
per month, to be provided on a universal, non-means tested basis. Monthly incomes higher
than R3000 would repay the BIG in the form of taxes, while incomes higher than R5000
would repay twice the BIG in the form of a solidarity tax (Barchiesi 2007: 568569).
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markets that citizens expect what was previously guaranteed by the state
(McLaren/Farahmandpur 2005: 100). Identities once defined by work and
civic responsibility come to be structured under the organizing principle of
consumerism. It is thus as consumers that individuals participate and find
meaning in democracy. Others like migrant laborers, non-unionized workers,
ethnic minorities, and other marginalized individuals and groups become
disenfranchised by an increasingly consumer-driven society, which they can
no longer participate in. As a result, the gap between their subjectivities and
democracys services continues to grow (Nielsen 2007). The stories of mass
protest and wildcat strikes in South Africa are also stories of the states irresponsiveness to the basic demands of individuals driven ever further away
from the state by the punishing demands of consumerism. The states response has, not unexpectedly, been antagonistic, as these individuals are
recognized less as deserving citizens and more as intrusive/disruptive elements in the liberal democratic pact. In South Africa the slow death of the
democratic citizen has been years in the making, as intensified economic
competition entrenched through the explicit alignment of capital with state
interests narrows the scope for the radicalization of the democracy.
Conclusion
Despite the ambivalent relation of the postcolony to the legacies of the Enlightenment, it was hoped that decolonization would foster democracies
where citizens could enjoy freedom in all aspects of life. Its failure, however,
has produced a world in which the needs of consumers are increasingly constructed around hyper-individualism, instant gratification, moral decay, and
hedonism, and with this, the entrenchment of a capitalist culture of contradictions. In the case studies of South Africa and Uganda, this essay has posited
these contradictions as the antithesis of freedom and of universal human
rights. As a walling mechanism, human rights have morphed into exclusionary instruments that account for some and exclude others through its
discursive practices and disciplinary regimes. In addition, there is a paradox
inherent in the expectation that the postcolonial bourgeois state, on the one
hand the guarantor of equal citizenship rights, and on the other, the mediator
of capital, can constitute the locus for radical democratization. For those
whose cultural and traditional modes of production and reproduction do not
fit with the logic of capitalist expansion, development means dispossession
and exclusion. The process of decolonization is as much about exposing the
processes through which such dispossession continues to take place at present, as it is about restoring the dignity and human rights of every human
being regardless of their individual subjugations. Civil society actors, as a
Democracys Subjections
291
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Navneet Kumar
Independence gained by many colonized Third World countries in the latter
half of the twentieth century has raised important questions about sovereignty,
the role of the sovereign, the countries relationships with former colonizers,
and, concomitantly, the resistance of the Third World peoples against forces
of neo-colonialism and also against their own rulers, democratically elected
or not. While according to Antony Anghie (2004: 2), there were differences
between the First World and the Third World acquisition and understanding
of sovereignty, in this paper I argue that in spite of these differences, the
realization of national sovereignty both within the First and Third Worlds has
produced what Giorgio Agamben calls states of exception (2005: 2). I engage with Carl Schmitt's Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept
of Sovereignty, Agamben's The State of Exception, and Homo Sacer to primarily highlight the conclusion that the states ability to resort to creating a
state of exception putting the constitutional rights of citizens in abeyance
and simultaneously creating non-citizens out of some is increasingly being
presented as a norm. According to Agamben, once categorized as noncitizens, such people are classified as stateless and even assumed to be outside the sphere of power or influence. Further, I draw upon the works of Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, primarily Who Sings the NationState?, to contest this equation (non-citizens as stateless and powerless) to
finally illustrate that statelessness can be equated with performative power
through my reading of Harold Pinters Mountain Language as a text that
illustrates this. While Agambens work provides insights into the creation of
the stateless entity, Butler and Spivaks work is essential in comprehending
the notion of performative power inherent in statelessness. Butler and Spivak's argument holds relevance for postcolonial studies as it delineates strategies of resistance amidst Western interventions in the name of humanitarian
wars in former colonies where the stateless, according to Agamben, remain
outside the purview of any response, recourse, or power.
A few months after the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration authorized
the indefinite detention of what it termed as non-citizens suspected of terrorist
leanings and activities. There was some opposition to this move by the US
government, which granted the state unlimited powers to contain the threat of
terrorism to the extent that these powers in turn threatened the normal func-
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Navneet Kumar
tioning of democracy in many cases. Several academics and artists have combated and critiqued this manufactured frenzy of security and nationalism in
their critical and creative works. One such critic, Spivak (2010: 50), highlights the unrestrained power accorded to the sovereign in the name of national security, and it is the abuse of this power in creating a hypernormative
state that some of her recent writings are concerned with. Likewise, following
Schmitts seminal work mentioned earlier, Agamben (2005: 7) explores the
states resort to the categorization of people as non-citizens to argue that this
unusual extension of state power, or what he calls state of exception, is a
powerful strategy that has the potential to transform democracies into totalitarian states. He argues that such a state of exception increasingly appears as
the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics (ibid: 2).
The nation-states ability to readily and legitimately transform this provisional
and exceptional measure into a technique of government is what Agambens
recent work is concerned with.
Reflecting on this state of exception as the new norm, Butler and Spivak
(2007: 35) provide a powerful argument against the homogenizing effects of
the modern nation-state, as it makes effusive and lasting distinctions between
citizens and non-citizens. They argue that while the state signifies the legal
and political institutional structures that delimit a certain territory, a nation
refers only to a socio-cultural entity, a union of people united by a common
language, heritage, and culture (ibid: 4). If the state binds people together in
the name of the nation, then it imposes on people a certain homogeneous way
of being, belonging, and identity. They further argue that while a state is a
structure that binds people together in the name of the nation by conjuring a
certain version of the nation on its people, it is also clearly an entity that unbinds and creates the category of statelessness (ibid). It is this common-sense
assumption and equation between statelessness and powerlessness of the noncitizen that I wish to explore further.
Harold Pinters Mountain Language is a text that, I argue, equates statelessness not with a loss of power but with a condition steeped in power. In
this paper, I shall examine Schmitts and Agambens claims about the creation of statelessness through the invocation of the state of exception; Butler
and Spivaks noteworthy categorization of statelessness as not a state of dispossession but a life saturated with power (2007: 40), and through an interface with Pinters text I argue that statelessness as experienced by the Old
Woman in the play is not to be held synonymous with deprivation but is a
condition steeped in performative power. I argue that while the states decision to create non-citizens may be warranted in the name of some exigency,
the category of non-citizenship need not necessarily be equated with dispossession.
297
Scheuerman further elaborates that Schmitt endorses the most terrible features
of National Socialism most importantly, its radical anti-Semitism and ethnic
cleansing because
he sees these elements as indispensable to the task of constructing an alternative legal
system capable of guaranteeing the determinacy allegedly missing from formalistic modes
of liberal law (ibid).
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Navneet Kumar
He argues that with the rise of the general will or the will of the people postEnlightenment, the decisionistic and personalistic element in the concept of
sovereignty was lost (ibid). It is the sovereign who must decide whether a
situation is an exception or not and if any decisions need to be taken in order
to create or recover a juridical order when the existing one is threatened by
chaos. Thus in many ways Schmitt normalizes the acts of the sovereign in the
name of law, which the sovereign is supposedly upholding. Schmitt opens his
book with the following statement: Sovereign is he who decides on the exception (ibid: 5). George Schwab elaborates that
a state of exception includes any kind of severe economic or political disturbance that
requires the application of extraordinary measures, and for which the constitution makes
provisions (Schwab 1989: 7).
While Schwab points out that the state of exception is different from a state of
emergency because the former presupposes a constitutional order, he misses
the point that the state of exception mocks the very constitutional order of the
land that it is supposedly safeguarding. It is no surprise that Schmitt accords
wide-ranging powers to the sovereign in determining what constitutes a threat
to public order and safety.
While advocating the cause for the sovereigns action, Schmitt is simultaneously aware that all tendencies of modern constitutional development
point toward eliminating the sovereign in this sense (Schmitt 1985: 5). He, in
fact, rues the competing claims on competences in the German constitution of
1919, which gave the president of the Reich the right to declare the exception,
but at the same time put him under the control of the parliament. Schmitts
aspiration of achieving legal determinacy of some sort within the German
framework has prompted Agamben to treat the state of exception and its consequences in a modern-day framework. Yet, one needs to make the important
distinction that while Schmitt endorses the achievement of legal determinacy,
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Navneet Kumar
concept of citizenship is redefined and recoded to include and exclude a certain set of people. The concept of citizenship is of course so narrowly and
homogeneously defined that the disenfranchised clearly become the national
minorities (ibid: 19). For Butler and Spivak, the nation-state can establish its
own image as the norm and hence the deviation is termed as an aberration.
Clinton Rossiter argues how
in times of crisis a democratic, constitutional government must temporarily be altered to
whatever degree is necessary to overcome the peril and restore normal conditions (Rossiter
1963: 5).
Rossiter is aware that such means are fraught with obvious dangers, and he is
also aware that such methods of creating a state of exception have become a
paradigm of governance today. The nation-state through its invasive propaganda machine can both elaborate on a crisis and in some cases even create
a crisis of its own. Also, the provisional nature of such extreme measures of
the state of exception is itself in question, as these actions have become lasting peacetime solutions going well past their initial time intent. Historically,
as Agamben demonstrates, the state of exception has been proclaimed to issue
emergency decrees in the German Reich between 1919 and 1933, in France
during the revolution, in the United States between 1861 and 1865, and again
in 1933 during the time of the Great Depression. Keeping in view the above
contexts, Agamben writes that
the democratic principle of the separation of powers has today collapsed and that the
executive power has in fact, at least partially, absorbed the legislative power (Agamben
2005: 18).
The Parliament is more often limited to ratifying the decrees issued by the
executive power.
In examining the US history for such events, Agamben locates the example of Article 1, guaranteeing the writ of Habeas Corpus, being suspended at
the initiation of President Abraham Lincoln in April 1861. Even after Congress convened, Lincoln authorized the arrest and detention in military prisons of persons suspected of disloyal and treasonable practices. The existence of these non-citizens or refugees marks the erosion of the modern nation-state. Nowhere is this more apparent in modern-day politics than in the
conception of the stateless person as refugee, detainee, or as an exiled individual.
While the stateless person is seen as devoid of any power or performative
aspect, my reading of Mountain Language reveals the Old Woman, a stateless
person, to be full of performative power. Agambens emphasis on the indeterminacy of sovereign power, while no doubt useful, undermines the comprehension of political resistance. Antonio Negri (1999: 21), in his Insurgencies, addresses the distinction between sovereign power and the stateless and
emphasizes the creative, constituent power of the life of a multiplicity in
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juridico-political sphere as the excrescence of the religious and the profane and illuminates
the distinction between sacrificial and homicidal violence that lies at the heart of sovereign
power (Mills 2008: 72).
Hence, Agamben argues that the sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is
permitted to kill without committing homicide (Agamben 1998: 83). The
sovereign has precluded himself from the sphere of law and has thus generated a parallel domain that both derives its sustenance from the rule of the law
of the land and supersedes it simultaneously in the name of exigency.
However, the argument of necessity is at the core of the creation of the
state of exception in all cases across the spectrum. Necessitys ability to overrule the law derives from its very nature and its originary character. According to Agamben, the state of necessity is interpreted as a lacuna in public
law, which the executive power is obligated to remedy (Agamben 2005: 31)
and therefore consolidate its hold over it. The state of exception in extreme
cases, keeping in view the necessity of the salvation of the state, can lead to
what Agamben calls the iustitium which literally means standstill or a
suspension of the law (Agamben 2005: 41). Agamben, however, cautions
that iustitium is not to be confused with the idea of dictatorship, which is an
absence of law as compared to iustitium, which is a suspension of law. There
is a basic flaw in the imposition of the iustitium, because one encounters the
impossibility of clearly defining the legal consequences of those acts committed during the iustitium. The acts committed during the iustitium are perpetrated in a juridical void, and consequentially they are radically removed from
any juridical determination. Since the term iustitium implies a standstill or a
suspension of law, all legal prescriptions are put out of operation. Thus for
him the state of exception is not defined as a fullness of powers, a pleromatic
state of law, as in the dictatorial model, but as a kenomatic state, an emptiness
and standstill of the law (Agamben 2005: 48). He refuses to equate the state
of exception to dictatorship for this reason.
Going back to the figure of the refugee or the stateless person, we encounter in Agambens work an analysis of the decline of the modern nation-state.
The stateless person becomes an embodiment of nationalist politics and fervor with nationalism operating in an inclusionary/exclusionary manner to
create the division. In fact, the figure of the refugee is an example of the sovereigns exercising the state of exception and hence creating this figure in
turn. This leads us to a further examination of the category of statelessness,
which is ostensibly created when one is put outside the stipulated mode of any
national belonging. Spivak, in Nationalism and the Imagination, focuses on
how nationalism has been related to reproductive heteronormativity as a
source of legitimacy and in turn to the creation of the category of the stateless
(Spivak 2010: 13). She wonders as to
303
when and how does the comfort felt in ones mother tongue and the comfort felt in ones
corner of the sidewalk, a patch of ground [] transform itself into a nation thing (Spivak
2010: 15).
Seen from the perspective of the public-private divide, Spivak maintains that
the impulse to nationalism is that we must control the workings of our own
public sphere (ibid: 18). With this, she argues, comes the necessary sense of
being unique, better, and even belonging. She proposes that statelessness is
created within the legitimate sphere of national belonging and its exclusions.
In other words, the moment one is characterized as outside any national
belonging, one is termed a non-citizen and one is rendered stateless for all
juridical purposes. One can be characterized as a non-citizen when certain
linguistic, judicial, legal, and other rights are taken away and all constitutional
protections are withdrawn and suspended. For example, Mountain Language
by Pinter exhibits the creation of a nation-state where the rights of a nameless
minority have been taken away. The minorities are imprisoned and the use of
their mountain language is forbidden until further notice. Such linguicidal
tendencies, while clearly deriving from the sovereigns proclamation of the
state of exception, point towards the demarcation of the nation-state between
those who legitimately belong and those who do not. However, the mountain
people, while they have become stateless, are still under the control of state
power. They have been cast out linguistically and in Agambens term relegated to bare life.
Further, Butler and Spivak argue that the category of statelessness is produced by an act of volition by the state where it seeks to align itself with the
homogeneous nation and hence by virtue of this alignment creates national
minorities. One can argue that statelessness is a stipulative and discursive
category produced by non-qualification. In this context, Butler and Spivak
write that:
The nation-state assumes that the nation expresses a certain national identity, is founded
through the concerted consensus of a nation, and that a correspondence exists between the
state and the nation The nation, in this view, is singular and homogeneous or, at least it
becomes so in order to comply with the requirements of the state (Butler/Spivak 2007: 30).
This scenario may further lead to a suspension of any legal recourse available
to the minorities. Women are being made to wait in the cold outside to meet
their loved ones, who are prisoners of the state now. Their crimes, of course,
have been unilaterally designated by the state and the prisoners are now
called enemies of the state. The phrase enemies of the state is loose
enough to cover a range from mild disagreement against the state to full violent, dissident opposition to the state and its practices. The prisoners are
clearly people who have not qualified to be considered citizens and hence
threaten to disrupt the seeming homogeneity and purity of the creation of this
nation-state. The nation-state requires not only a periodic creation of national
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Navneet Kumar
minorities but their expulsion and dispossession in order to gain a legitimating ground for itself as a political creation.
The state of exception accords quasi-absolute powers to the executive and
therefore, acts committed during this time of necessity seem to escape all
legal consequences. Agamben insinuates that when the state of exception
becomes the rule, then the juridico-political system transforms itself into a
killing machine (Agamben 2005: 86). The state of exception has functioned
without interruption since World War II in the name of necessity. Indeed,
Butler and Spivak comment how
whole wars are waged in the name of [the necessity] of national security, a value and an
ideal that makes mockery of any efforts to make the declaration of war contingent upon
constitutional or international justifications (Butler/Spivak 2007: 36).
Through the application of this state of exception, the normative aspect of law
can be ignored with impunity by any government that ironically claims to be
upholding the law of the land, whilst simultaneously justifying violence.
Butler and Spivak (2007: 9) also argue that power is not the same as law,
since these people who are subsisting in this condition of bare life (and power) are outside the province of law. They thereby divest the common topological associations of statelessness and dispossession. While Agambens analysis of the stateless person and the refugee stops at dispossession, detention,
and depravity for the stateless, for Butler and Spivak, statelessness is not to
be held as synonymous with dispossession. What appears as performative
power in Butler and Spivak is realized as constituent power in Negri
both attesting to the error in Agambens work to construe bare life or the
consequent statelessness as a fundamentally passive condition in relation to
sovereign violence. Agamben for his part has argued that the violence of
modern democracy represses any attempt to challenge it and therefore, opposition or resistance is not a reality. Performative power and constituent
power as realized in the Old Womans silence at the end of the play are
instances of the possibility of resistance in the face of sovereign violence.
Much like the street demonstrations of illegal residents in the spring of
2006 in various cities of California, who were responding to George Bushs
claim that the US national anthem can only be sung in English, the military
decree in Mountain Language ordains that only the language of the capital be
spoken at the exclusion of all others. The monolingual requirements of the
nation surface here much like the situation in Mountain Language where the
militarys linguicidal policies are far more threatening than monolingualism.
The enactment of the freedom of assembly in the case of the street protest is
in defiance of the law. The way the singing of the national anthem for the
illegal residents of California becomes a moment of what Butler calls a performative contradiction, I argue that the Old Womans silence at the end of
the play can be interpreted as an exercise in freedom to assert equality in
relation to authority.
305
The next part of my paper examines forms of resistance that elude or challenge sovereign power or authority. I exemplify this constituent power or
performative power amidst a situation of statelessness through a reading of
the Old Womans silence at the end of Mountain Language.
The prisoners in Mountain Language are at the receiving end of the dictates from a nameless sovereign whose power is enacted through the unambiguous utterances enforced by the soldiers. One can argue that the prisoners
and their loved ones have been relegated to a bare life: a life exposed to
death. The imposition of the language dictate that prohibits the mountain
people from speaking their own language is presented as a law to them. The
Sergeant prohibits the use of mountain language by the women who are waiting outside the prison to see their loved ones in the following manner:
This is a military decree. It is the law. Your language is forbidden. It is dead. No one is
allowed to speak your language. Your language no longer exists (Pinter 2005: 12).
Butler and Spivak in their writing argue that one crucial and central operation of sovereign power is the capacity to suspend the rights of individuals or
groups or to cast them out of a polity (Butler/Spivak 2007: 39). Once cast
out into a space of bare life, their conditions of citizenship are jeopardized. In
spite of the fact that the women visiting the prison are excluded from the bios
and relegated to the zoe, one can argue that such a life is not without its performative exuberance and empowerment.
When the Sergeant indicts the women from speaking and constantly jabs
at the Old Woman for not speaking the language of the state, he reinforces the
ideology of the homogeneity of the formation of the nation-state which treats
any deviance as an aberration and hence worthy of expulsion and arraignment. The alignment of the state with a singular identity proposes a cultural
nationalism that works against any redistributive social injustice in the culturally chosen nation (Spivak 2010: 44). Spivak alerts us to the dangers of such
nationalism which emanates from the alignment of a singular identity with the
identity of the nation as a whole. In Nationalism and the Imagination (2010)
and elsewhere, Spivak argues that the task of the humanities in the globalized
world today is to train the imagination that can divest us of the baggage of
nationalist identitarianism and carry us beyond our national boundaries,
which seem constrictive in many ways (Spivak 2008: 49). Spivak claims that
education in the Humanities attempts to be an uncoercive rearrangement of
desires which guides individuals away from a coercive and parochial conception of nationalism and other such mindsets (ibid: 17, 23). According to
her, [t]he method of a specifically literary training, a slow mind-changing
process, can be used to open the imagination to such mindsets (ibid: 24).
This training of the imagination is an important link in her transnational
literacy initiative which in turn is for her the principal feature of decolonization (Spivak 2012: 152). An imagination trained in the Humanities may dis-
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Navneet Kumar
engage the truth-claims of national identity forced upon the people in Mountain Language. According to Spivak, the task of the literary imagination is the
persistent de-transcendentalizing of categories such as nationalism. One can
argue that the Old Woman becomes representative of Spivaks teacher of the
humanities, whose one of the many tasks is to keep the abstract and reasonable civic structures of the state free of the burden of cultural nationalism
(Spivak 2010: 50). The Old Woman as the teacher of the humanities effectively undoes the seamless equation created by the sovereign state between
citizenship, identity, and power. By being able to infiltrate the power structures of the military state in Mountain Language through her silence, the Old
Woman ironically is the character that ends up having a voice in the play.
Once indicted, the Old Woman grows silent even as the orders prohibiting
the use of language are temporarily lifted, she resiliently defies the martial
decree and its lifting through her performative and/or constituent contradiction. The Old Woman, initially conceived as a subaltern someone who is
removed from and outside all lines of social mobility no longer remains a
victim; instead she has become an agent. Subalternity is the regulated place
from where the capacity for the formation of a recognizable basis of action
cannot be realized or is radically obstructed. The Old Woman's silence becomes a mode of self-representation allowing her to escape the silence of
subalternity and by inference, one can argue that the subaltern can speak. This
coming of the subaltern from the deduced subject of crisis to the logic of
agency makes the Old Woman into the bearer of some agential intuition.
Spivak cautions that the activation of singular agency must not be equated
with and seen translated into a multiplicity. Such differently repeated singularities collectively are a multiplicity, and this is evident in the persona of the
Old Woman whose singularity, repeated with a difference, constitutes not an
empirical collective but works by synechdoche, where the part is taken for the
whole (Spivak 2012: 436). Such singular acts of agential intuition alleviate
the responsibility of postcolonial intellectuals who have been asked to speak
for the subaltern. Asked to speak in her mountain language, the Old Woman
remains silent. Even though she is categorized as stateless, her condition
cannot be equated with a loss of power as is evidenced in her defiance at the
end of the play where much like the Latino street demonstrators in California,
she refuses to be categorized with ease. This jettisoned life, the one both
expelled and contained at the same time, Butler and Spivak would argue, is a
life that is saturated with power precisely at the moment in which it is deprived of citizenship (Butler/Spivak 2007: 40). In this case, the Womans
silence becomes one way of asserting criterial control over her speech and life
which had been jettisoned by the dictates of the sovereign. Since forcing
someone to speak is one of the most unenforceable of acts as opposed to
other strictures, the Old Woman arguably cherishes her moment of triumph.
307
In each case, the Old Woman speaks through her silence and Draupadi speaks
through her refusal to dress up modestly after being raped. How can one make
someone speak against one's will and how can one clothe someone against
one's unwillingness to do so are questions that ultimately accord agency to the
characters here. I have argued that the Old Womans silence is precisely the
kind of performative contradiction that leads not to impasse but to forms of
insurgency (Butler/Spivak 2007: 63). This performative and constituent
aspect is something that is ignored by Agamben in his analysis of sovereign
power which he sees as foreclosing all possibilities of recourse and resistance.
Because the Old Womans silence is perceived as a performative contradiction whose effects unfold in time, Butler would argue that to
exercise a freedom and to assert an equality precisely in relation to an authority that would
preclude both is to show how freedom and equality can and must move beyond their positive articulations (ibid: 6667).
However, the similarity between the Old Woman and Draupadi in their act of
subversion against the sovereign marks them as agents of performative contradiction. These women can no longer be characterized as subaltern; in spite
of being characterized and deemed as non-citizens by the sovereign, they
have spoken.
308
Navneet Kumar
309
Bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio (1998): Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Heller-Rozen, Daniell. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Agamben, Giorgio (2005): State of Exception, trans. Attell, Kevin. Chicago/London:
University of Chicago Press.
Anghie, Antony (2004): Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International
Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Appiah, Anthony (1992): In My Fathers House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Butler, Judith/Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2007): Who Sings the Nation-State?
London: Seagull Books.
Cheah, Pheng (2003): Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation. New York: Columbia University Press.
Devi, Mahasweta (2002): Breast Stories. Kolkata: Seagull.
Mills, Catherine (2008): The Philosophy of Agamben. Montreal/Kingston: McGillQueens University Press.
Murray, Alex (2010): Giorgio Agamben. London/New York: Routledge.
Negri, Antonio (1999): Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans.
Boscagli, Maurizia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Pinter, Harold (2005): Mountain Language. In: Pinter, Harold: Death etc. New York:
Grove Press, pp. 5-20.
Rossiter, Clinton (1963): Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.
Schmitt, Carl (1985): Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. Schwab, George. Cambridge: MIT Press.
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Navneet Kumar
Scheuerman, William (1999): Carl Schmitt: The End of Law. Maryland: Rowman and
Littlefield Publishers.
Schwab, George (1989): The Challenge of the Exception: An Introduction to the
Political Ideas of Sovereignty of Carl Schmitt Between 1921 and 1936. New
York: Greenwood Press.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2008): Other Asias. Malden: Blackwell Publishing.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2010): Nationalism and the Imagination. London: Seagull Books.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2012): An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Strang, David (1996): Contested Sovereignty: The Social Construction of Colonial
Imperialism. In: Cambridge Studies in International Relations 46, pp. 2249.
312
Provincializing Cosmopolitanism
313
excludes others such as migrants without citizenship status from democratic participation. Benhabibs (ibid: 20) cosmopolitan project hopes to
perform a mediating function between the emerging international civil society
and national democratic structures. She does not treat cosmopolitanism as a
global ethical or cultural attitude; rather she conceives of cosmopolitanism in
line with Kant as based on universally applicable norms which influence
legislative morality within a global context and provide individuals, who
are not citizens of a particular nation-state, with avenues for pursuing legal
claims against that state (ibid). Contemporary democracies, according to her,
are guided by universal principles and human rights, but do not apply these
equally to all groups within their territory. More effective and inclusive democratic procedures for safeguarding universal human rights therefore have to
be developed. Benhabib sees a possibility for pursuing such transformations
by means of democratic iterations. This concept constitutes a space that
mediates between institutionalized legal norms and demands for change by
civil society actors. For Benhabib (2011: 76), legal norms are not frozen in
time and space, but evolve into self-reflective norms through uncoercive
democratic iterations (ibid), which arguably resemble Spivaks concept of
uncoercive rearrangement of desires (2008: 154). This process changes not
only the principles informing legal decisions, but also the understanding of
democracy, the criteria for membership of a democratic state, and the rights
of minority groups within its territory. Such changes, which are often pursued
by emancipatory social movements and other civil society actors, can affect
judicial and executive state authorities as well as public discourse through the
media, but are usually subject to political contestation.
In Benhabibs earlier writings, democratic iteration was still framed in
terms of an interactive universalism (1992: 153) relying on two principal
theoretical components: firstly, it draws on the term iteration, which derives
from Derrida's (1988) deconstructive philosophy of language; secondly, it is
inspired by the process of jurisgenesis attributed to the American legal
theorists Robert Cover (1983) and Frank Michelman (1996). The term iteration stems from the Sanskrit word itara which means other (Derrida 1988:
7). Iteration highlights that every repetition of a term leads to a change in
its meaning, since each use occurs within an altered context. As a result, one
cannot assume that a term has any primary or original meaning, since any
previous meaning already constitutes a modification of an earlier meaning.
Benhabib argues that in the context of laws and institutional norms, in contrast to the philosophy of language, the principle of iteration needs to be reformulated, since every reference to a norm occurs within a context of institutionalized procedures for creating and interpreting legal norms. With each
repetition of an existing norm, its meaning and thus the context for future
repetitions is transformed. Thus, democratic iteration not only transforms
legal norms, but also the identities of civil society actors involved in this
314
process. In The Rights of Others (2004) and subsequent publications, Benhabib unpacks possible practical applications of democratic iteration
through several case studies that largely concentrate on debates over multiculturalism, for instance French debates over veiling in public (laffair du foulard) and their legal ramifications. We will focus on these case studies critically after examining Benhabibs reception of the principle of jurisgenesis
as developed by Robert Cover in Nomos and Narrative (1983).
Benhabib understands jurisgenesis as
iterative acts through which a democratic people that considers itself bound by certain
guiding norms and principles reappropriates and reinterprets these, thus showing itself not
only the subject but also the author of the laws (Benhabib 2004: 181).
Provincializing Cosmopolitanism
315
316
Honig (2006: 102127) criticizes that despite aiming for a renewed cosmopolitanism, Benhabib merely reproduces existing cosmopolitan models
based on moral leadership from above. Benhabibs concept of democratic
iteration thus responds politically to a contradiction she does not seek to
overcome. According to Honig (ibid: 113), Benhabibs main argument is that
if individuals are excluded from democratic participation through cosmopolitan laws that, while not perfect, are nonetheless progressive, courts and civil
society actors should take corrective action to address such exclusions and
practice an enhanced universalism. Honig (ibid: 111) criticizes Benhabibs
conception of the process of shaping identities through democratic iterations as inevitably aimed towards a specific normative goal, although such
processes can equally lead to outcomes opposed to such goals. According to
Honig (ibid: 112), Benhabibs discussion of the laffaire du foulard debates1 is not only based on evolutionist assumptions of an increasing universalization of liberal values, but also illustrates the static and formalistic nature
of Benhabibs theories. Benhabib judges the actions of the schoolgirls positively, since their resistance against the French state may eventually teach
them to put up resistance against Islam, which is hardly a compelling argument. Honig (ibid: 109) also criticizes Benhabibs overall understanding of
the law as antiquated and overly formalistic. Benhabib (2006: 60) draws a
distinction between the spheres of law and politics, but believes that politics
can influence the legal sphere or even break down the barriers between politics and law. Honig (2006: 111) critiques that Benhabibs understanding of
law and politics is insufficiently open to future changes of societal objectives
or demands, but is instead fixed on the normative goal of increased tolerance
of difference and an enhanced universalism. Benhabib, according to Honig
(ibid: 110), relies on a subsumptive formalistic logic, which does not treat
new demands as fundamentally opposed to existing understandings of the
law, but as shaping them in a particular direction. Democratic iterations are
not generally aimed at changing universal norms, but merely changing the
relationship of legal subjects towards those norms. None of Benhabibs examples of democratic iteration led to a substantive change to universal
norms in practice. The individuals in the case of the l'affaire du foulard and
in that of Fereshta Ludin2 failed to change prevailing norms. In another example, proposed changes to Hamburg's and Schleswig-Holsteins election
1
2
These debates in France were initiated by three French schoolgirls refusing to comply with a
direction of their school principal to remove their head scarves (Benhabib 2004: 185).
Fereshta Ludin is a Muslim teacher, who took court action after being prevented from
teaching in German public schools by the regional authorities. This led to a vigorous public
debate within Germany. The Federal Constitutional Court held that the decision to bar Ludin from working as a teacher in public schools was not compliant with the constitution, indicating that further legislation was necessary to ban headscarves in public schools (Benhabib 2004: 198202).
Provincializing Cosmopolitanism
317
laws were reversed before they could enter into force.3 As Honig (2006: 113)
argues, these cases did not produce the reformist effects posited by Benhabib,
instead resulting in a further narrowing of options open to affected individuals. In Dignity in Adversity, Benhabib (2011: 152) has since conceded that
democratic iterations can on some occasions also lead to unduly narrow legal
interpretations.
In response to Honig, Benhabib further clarifies that just because her work
focuses on the juridico-political level, it does not follow that she does not
equally value ethico-political aspects. Benhabib (2006: 162) unpacks the
fundamental differences in their respective positions, arguing that while she
conducts an immanent critique within the philosophical tradition of a moral
and legal universalism, Honig provides an ideology critique.
While Benhabib focuses consistently on the position of migrants within
Western nation-states, she fails to distinguish between different categories of
migrants, whose experiences of exclusion differ widely, ranging from relatively privileged migrants with secure immigration status to illegal migrants
with no recourse to legal remedies. Benhabibs theoretical model for enhancing democratization through the progressive inclusion of groups excluded
from democratic decision-making is focused primarily on excluded groups
within a Western nation-state, but fails to take into account the challenges of
furthering democratization within a postcolonial context. Although she also
envisages mechanisms for protecting the rights of excluded groups on a transnational level, she remains insufficiently critical of the international civil
society, which can weaken rather than strengthen democratic structures in
postcolonial states and thus deepen the exclusion of subalterns living within
the global South. Her focus on extending civil rights within Western nationstates also fails to deal with situations where entitlements won by excluded
groups residing within the territory of a Western nation-state have a direct
negative impact on subalterns at the exploited end of the international division of labor, a factor highlighted by Spivak. We will now examine Spivak's
treatment of democratization from below in more detail.
The German provinces of Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein sought to extend the right to
vote at local government level to non-citizens. The proposed legislative changes were
blocked by the Federal Constitutional Court, after they were held to be in violation of the
constitution (Benhabib 2004: 202207).
318
Provincializing Cosmopolitanism
319
She first elaborated these arguments in the context of her critique of Michel
Foucault and Gilles Deleuze in her essay Can the Subaltern Speak? (1993a).
Within a discussion later published under the Title Intellectuals and Power
(Foucault/Deleuze 2006) these two prominent French post-structuralist theorists had posited that oppressed groups were themselves able to know and
articulate their own interests and to develop an understanding of the operations of power. Both argued that intellectuals were no longer needed to repre-
320
sent the interests of the oppressed, since the oppressed were better able to
speak for themselves. Spivak strongly disputes these claims. She considers
Foucaults and Deleuzes treatment of subalterns as fully conscious of their
class position and interests to be highly problematic, leading to intellectuals
treating their own role in representing oppressed subjects as transparent
(1999: 265). In order to adequately theorize the crucial role played by intellectuals in representing the needs and interests of subalterns, the different
meanings of representation, which Foucault and Deleuze run into one, have
to be distinguished clearly. In this context, Spivak (1999: 258) refers to The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx (2007 [1852]: 118
120), which makes a distinction between class as a descriptive and transformative category and between representation as speaking for (Vertretung)
and speaking about (Darstellung) others (Spivak 1993a: 71).
Concentrating primarily on the rural poor of the Third World, who are
removed from all access to democratic structures and social mobility,
Spivakian pedagogy aims at the slow work of the uncoercive rearrangement
of the desires of the subaltern [] their insertion into the intuition of a public
sphere (2008: 154), which is central to undoing subalternity. She (2008: 51)
uses the concept metaphor suture for sewing together tissue (or texts in the
wide deconstructive sense) to describe such a pedagogy aimed at bringing
together notions of rights and of responsibility. The challenge is to suture
together responsibility-based subaltern cultural axiomatics defective for capitalism (2008: 25) with the principles of the Enlightenment based on individual rights and democratic participation in order to use them from below
(2008: 145). She stresses the mutuality of this suturing pedagogy (in the sense
of teachers and subaltern students learning from each other) and the crucial
importance of effective access to abstract structures of parliamentary representation (1996: 296). Formal voting rights without intuition of a public
sphere do not enable subalterns to make their voices heard. Spivak points to
an epistemic fracture between the epistemes of subaltern and hegemonic classes, which needs to be sutured by mutual learning between subaltern and
privileged subjects (2008: 29).
Benhabibs theories, by contrast, are based on an interpretation of cosmopolitanism which does not systematically take into account the sharp differentials in access to material and epistemic resources on both sides of the international division of labor. They also ignore the widely divergent impacts of
neocolonial geopolitical and geo-economic structures, which are rooted in
histories of colonial violence and exploitation, on both sides of the international division of labor. The negative impacts of these structures disproportionately affect subaltern subjects within the global South, rather than excluded groups residing within Western nation-states. Benhabibs concept of
democratic iteration represents a well-meaning cosmopolitan attempt to
integrate excluded actors into the political sphere in order to deepen democra-
Provincializing Cosmopolitanism
321
tization. However, it cannot be assumed that all subjects can make their interests count in parliamentary structures. The concept of subalternity therefore
assumes central importance in questions of effective democratization. Cosmopolitan theories of democracy like Benhabibs, which fail to take account
of the wide-ranging consequences of subalternization, can provide neither the
conceptual nor practical means for integrating subalterns into democratic
processes, which is the central goal of Spivaks desubalternizing pedagogy.
Subalterns within the global South are often directly affected by decisions
made by powerful Western nation-states and by the international civil society,
but have no effective means of influencing those decisions. Efforts to widen
democratic participation should therefore also focus on subaltern subjects
within the global South, whom Benhabib fails to consider systematically.
One prerequisite for integrating subalterns into democratic structures,
which Spivak believes to be latent within many subaltern cultural contexts, is
a culture of responsibility which is often corrupted by patriarchal or nationalist ideologies and not easily accessible (2008: 24). Through her suturing elementary pedagogy, she seeks to enable rural subalterns to gain effective access to structures of parliamentary democracy by activating such neglected
epistemes. Her aim is to learn from her students' responses to her teaching
attempts to tailor her teaching to the needs of those particular students.
Spivak views the relationship between teacher and student as dialectical,
based on a learning to learn from below (2004: 548). This concept of learning from below is based on Marx's third Feuerbach thesis that the educators
themselves need to be educated (Marx 2008 [1845]: 145). Spivak compares
this learning to literary reading within the academic context, which she
treats as a training to learn from the singular and the unverifiable (2008:
23).
For Spivak, the imagination is an inbuilt instrument of Othering, encouraging understanding of other points of view and subject positions as well
as the persistent critical questioning of ones own complicity with hegemonic
structures and ones own implicit support for a vicious system which denigrates subaltern subject positions (1996: 276). Education, in her view, is a
responsible intervention in normality (2008: 257) within both the subaltern
and privileged context. Within a class-privileged context, Spivak puts particular emphasis on learning from below and on unlearning ones own privileges as a loss (1996: 4), stressing that ones own privilege limits one's capacity for understanding subaltern subject positions and epistemes. She calls
on privileged subjects to avoid sanctioned ignorance (1999: 279) her term
for a generally accepted lack of knowledge or concern about subalternized
epistemes and experiences within hegemonic structures, for example within
academic institutions. Pedagogy thus becomes an ethico-political practice of
establishing a singular relation between subaltern and privileged subjects
322
without guarantees (2008: 23), since all pedagogical efforts can never succeed once and for all, but must forever be renewed.
Spivak has spoken in detail about her educational work with subaltern
children in India in Righting Wrongs (2004). This work has involved frustrating struggles with the deeply class-divided structures of the Indian education
system. Spivak (2008: 44) criticizes sharply that in Indian schools attended by
the middle and upper classes, students learn to understand texts, whereas
students from lower classes are only given an education consisting of spelling
and rote learning. Because of this education, which prepares poor children
solely for manual work and stunts their cognitive functions, it is unsurprising that many teachers in schools for the poor are those least successful in
instilling knowledge in subaltern children, who are not born least successful, just as class-privileged children are not born electronic (2008: 557).
Most subaltern teachers who experience problems in explaining the subject
matter they are teaching do so because they do not understand it themselves
and do not know how to write freely, only having learnt to spell and mechanically repeat things learnt by rote (2004: 561). Spivak trains subaltern teachers
to listen to the children before all else. Through consistently taking the reactions of the children to her teaching into account, she hopes to learn how an
intuition of abstract democratic structures might be activated in those children.
Instead of developing new concepts of democracy, she seeks to patiently
embed democratic practices and rituals from below within the everyday
lives of subalterns (2004: 559). Through training teachers, who are in turn
involved in teaching children, Spivak hopes to work towards recoding hierarchical rituals of subjugation into rituals of parliamentary democracy. She
compares this demanding process of recoding with the hacking of software
(2008: 51). Ritual practices based on obedience to authority are cracked like a
code and overwritten by new codes and habitualized practices of the critical
independence of the mind (ibid).
Conclusion
Spivak and Benhabib both aim for increased democratic participation within
contemporary globalized capitalist structures, but propose very different
strategies for achieving this goal. Benhabib seeks to deepen democratization
primarily by changing the public discourse within liberal nation-states of the
global North, whereas Spivaks theories aim to extend democratic participation to all subjects within the global North and South. Benhabibs concept of
democratic iteration envisages marginalized individuals like migrants using
the constitutional mechanisms of liberal nation-states to challenge their exclu-
Provincializing Cosmopolitanism
323
sion while strengthening the universal norms of democracy, human rights, and
citizenship. However, her case studies show that discriminatory practices are
often reinforced rather than alleviated through such efforts to make democratic institutions and the judicial system more responsive to excluded groups.
Benhabibs failure to consider possible negative or ambivalent outcomes of
democratic iterations is problematic, as is her assumption that marginalized
groups can pursue their interests without mediation. While her treatment of
democratic iterations is geopolitically specific to liberal nation-states of the
Euro-US, it ignores those states systemic imbrication in neocolonial structures. These neocolonial globalized capitalist structures can fatally weaken
democratic control and participation, particularly within the global South, but
increasingly also within the global North. However, they affect subalterns
within the global South even more severely than marginalized groups within
the Euro-US.
Democratic iteration might be a useful tool for the empirical analysis of
struggles for democratization, provided the outcome of such struggles is not
prejudged or viewed in isolation from wider historical and geopolitical contexts, as in Benhabibs treatment of issues like statelessness, asylum, and
immigration, which systematically ignores epistemic and material barriers to
democratic participation faced by marginalized groups worldwide.
Spivaks theoretization of democracy by contrast scrupulously takes account of such epistemic and material obstacles, which she seeks to overcome
by activating democratic instincts in all subjects located in the global North
and South. Spivaks strategies for increasing democratization are decidedly
pedagogical in character and aim at undoing class apartheid. Education
performs a crucial role both in encouraging privileged subjects located within
hegemonic structures to engage responsibly with others and in enabling subalterns to think of themselves as part of the public sphere and of democratic
interactions. These democratic interactions are designed not only to encourage children to critically question their own position in hegemonic structures,
but also to develop the capacity to make their own interests count not only
by changing their position within hegemonic structures but by changing these
structures themselves. Spivak (1999: 383) consistently stresses the importance of wider structural changes to neocolonial capitalist structures,
which she envisages repeatedly being turned towards the social on a planetary
scale. A narrower focus on incremental democratic change within the EuroUS without critical awareness of wider geopolitical structures can instead
worsen the exploitation of subaltern subjects on the other side of the international division of labor. The profound structural inequalities within globalized
capitalism make constant vigilance about ones own privileges and structural
effects beyond ones intentions vital. However, Spivaks understanding of
pedagogy is largely limited to formal education, placing much less emphasis
on other strategies for promoting epistemological change. Though Spivaks
324
concept of uncoercive rearrangement of desire at the subaltern and privileged end seems plausible, the mechanisms of fostering greater sensitivity to
injustice through education need to be further elaborated. The question remains, whether better formal education in schools and universities can itself
be sufficient to promote wider changes to hegemonic structures. As Antonio
Gramsci (2012: 14981502) stresses in his Prison Notebooks, changes within
the public sphere can be mediated just as much through the arts, culture, the
press, or the legal system as through formal education. Spivaks concept of
learning to learn from below is nonetheless highly useful, particularly due
to her stress on historical and epistemic violence and on the constant need for
critical scrutiny of ones own assumptions and position in hegemonic structures. In order to work towards increased democratization and the inclusion of
subaltern subjects on a truly global scale, it remains urgent for postcolonial
feminists to carry out the necessary but impossible task of provincializing
cosmopolitan theories of democracy by critically highlighting Eurocentric
teleological assumptions in theories of democracy, which treat European
liberal democracy as universal and normative, without reflecting on the geopolitical and historical particularity of this epistemological framework.
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Notes on Contributors
Mara do Mar Castro Varela is Political Scientist, Professor at the Alice Salomon University, Berlin. She was Maria Goeppert-Mayer Guest Professor at
the Carl v. Ossietzky University in Oldenburg and lecturer at the Zurich University of the Arts. She has held visiting fellowships at the University of Costa Rica; Institute for International Law and the Humanities, The University of
Melbourne, Australia; University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain; Pusan National University, South Korea. Publications include: Ist Integration ntig?
Eine Streitschrift (2013) und Unzeitgeme Utopien. Migrantinnen zwischen
Selbsterfindung und Gelehrter Hoffnung (2007).
Frederick Cowell is currently completing his PhD, specializing in the postcolonial politics of Supranational Human Rights Organizations, at Birkbeck
College, University of London. He has published widely on international
human rights law and has worked as a legal advisor for different human rights
organizations. Previously he has taught constitutional and human rights law at
three different universities. His research interests include theories of relativism, international law and postcolonialism and anti-discrimination in international law.
Nikita Dhawan is Junior Professor of Political Science for Gender/Postcolonial Studies and Director of the Frankfurt Research Center for Postcolonial Studies, Cluster of Excellence The Formation of Normative Orders,
Goethe University Frankfurt. She has held visiting fellowships at the University of Costa Rica, Institute for International Law and the Humanities, The
University of Melbourne, Australia; Program of Critical Theory, University
of California, Berkeley, USA; University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain;
Pusan National University, South Korea; Columbia University, New York,
USA. Publications include: Impossible Speech: On the Politics of Silence and
Violence (2007) and Postkoloniale Theorie. Eine kritische Einfhrung (jointly with Mara do Mar Castro Varela) (second completely revised and extended edition 2014).
Ulrike Hamann is a scholar of Cultural Studies and Political Sciences at Goethe University Frankfurt, currently finishing her PhD thesis on the Genealogies of Biopolitics in Colonial Germany, addressing counter-discourses and
strategies of intervention against racism within the German colonial enterprise. She was research fellow at the junior research group Transnational
Genealogies, Cluster of Excellence The Formation of Normative Orders,
Goethe University Frankfurt.
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Notes on Contributors
Notes on Contributors
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Notes on Contributors